Looking for Buddybuild Alternatives? Try App Center

Visual Studio App Center

With Buddybuild dropping Android support in March, we’d love for you to explore Visual Studio App Center as an option for your new home if you’re one of the many Android developers searching for an alternative cloud-based Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) service. Built for all developers and backed by Microsoft, we have a solid Android, iOS, and React Native CI/CD solution to help you get up and running quickly, allowing you to focus on what’s most important: creating great app experiences.

Why App Center is the Right Choice for You

App Center provides support for Android, iOS, React Native, and Cordova. Whether you build your mobile apps in Java, Swift, Objective-C, Xamarin, or React Native, App Center lets you easily manage the lifecycle of your apps. We have services to help you build in the cloud, test on real devices, distribute to beta testers, get real-time crash and analytics data, and are constantly striving to make App Center available to everyone with competitive free and paid offerings.

Along with language and platform support, as an API-first and with open-sourced SDKs, you’re able to integrate App Center into your existing development pipelines as they currently exist; if you have other solutions in place and only need a new build service, that’s not a problem! You can use just the parts of App Center that fit your needs.

Get Started in Minutes

We know that getting set up with new tooling can be challenging, but getting your application configured in App Center, with builds running on every push, can be set up in just a few steps.

• • Register for a free account at appcenter.ms.

• • Create a new Android application and set the application settings, such as platform and language.

• • Connect to your code repository and select the app you want to configure. We currently have support for GitHub, VSTS, and Bitbucket.

• • Select the branch you want to build, configure the settings as needed, and make sure you enable “Distribute Builds” so that you automatically distribute builds on a successful release.

• Once your app is successfully built, an email will be sent with an install link to the freshly built app.

Create your Distribution Groups

Once you have your process set up, the next step would be to recreate your Distribution groups. You can either do this from the portal, or potentially automate it using our robust API’s.

From the portal, you can quickly create a Distribution Group by going to the Distribution Section and selecting “New Group”. From there, you can enter the emails of your desired users to automatically send invitations and send the build you just configured.

For those of you with existing groups, you could also look to automate the process with our API, here are a couple of the key steps in the process:

• • First use BuddyBuilds API to acquire a list of your Distribution Groups: https://apidocs.buddybuild.com/deployment_groups/get-list.html

• • Once you have parsed that data, you can then recreate each of your previous groups in App Center with this API: https://openapi.appcenter.ms/#/account/distributionGroups_create

    To use the App Center API, you will need to authorize and generate an API token. You can find the steps to create a token here: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/appcenter/api-docs/

• As you create each group, you can then automatically re-add the members via their email: https://openapi.appcenter.ms/#/account/distributionGroups_addUser

That’s it! In just a handful of steps, you have an initial CI/CD solution within App Center, and your distribution groups ready to go once more. This is just the beginning of your journey, though. With a few lines of code you can integrate our SDK and start receiving valuable analytics data and detailed crash reports, track user adoption with each release, monitor the health of your app, and use this insight to drive your innovation going forward. While you’re at it, feel free to leave us a message or feedback via the blue chat icon on the bottom right of the portal.

Make the switch today and take advantage of what App Center can offer you and your development team!

Visual Studio App Center

Follow