Migrating off App Center Push
Retiring App Center Push
Earlier this year, Microsoft announced the retirement of the preview MBaaS services in Visual Studio App Center, which include Auth, Data, and Push services. Today we’re providing an update on the App Center Push retirement timeline and details to help you migrate to Azure Notifications Hubs.
We will retire App Center Push on February 15th, 2021 to give you sufficient time to migrate. We’re actively working on bringing the experience of App Center Push to Azure Notification Hubs as you migrate your apps. We have also released GA version of SDKs with the features below.
Migrating to Azure Notification Hubs
App Center Push customers recognize that there are some differences in experience between App Center’s offering and Azure Notification Hubs. As we prepare for your migration, we’ve been looking at the top features customers use and desire the most. We are excited to announce the GA release of the Notification Hubs SDK for Android and iOS that addresses many of those needs. With this update, we simplified the device onboarding process, and added additional features that benefit both existing Notification Hubs customers, as well as those migrating their apps from App Center Push.
SDKÂ Highlights
Here are a few key features of the Azure Notification Hubs SDK.
Device Registration
Getting started with notifications is now much easier given our streamlined registration experience. The new SDK supports automatic device registration with Notification Hubs via Installations and now automatically handles device registration for push notifications once you add the SDK to your app and enable push.
Notification Targeting with Tags
To enable a more personalized notification experience, targeting a specific user or a set of users and devices for a given application is key. App Center Push uses audiences to help developers and marketers target application users in different ways. Notification Hubs customers have a similar capability with Tags. The benefits to using tags is that you can have richer expressions with custom tag expressions as well as near real time targeting.
Tags for Installations
You can add custom tags to a device installation, which allows for developer specified audiences potentially defined by app/OS version, language, country, device model etc.
Tags for Users
App Center Push allows you to associate users with devices, and with the new Notification Hubs SDK, you can achieve the same result by setting a custom userID property tag.
Alert/Silent Notifications
With the Azure Notification Hubs SDK, you can set up a listener and be notified whenever a push notification is received in the background (silent push notification), or an alert has been clicked by the user.
Online/Offline Sync
A background synchronization manager ensures that when a device is offline, all installation changes are tracked and once network connectivity is re-established, they are synchronized with the service.
Enabling/Disabling Push
Just like App Center Push, the Notification Hubs SDK allows applications to enable or disable push. When disabled, push tokens are not refreshed but pushes are still received until the current token expires.
Getting Started with Notification Hubs
To help you get started, we’ve created a push migration guide that walks you through how to setup and use Azure Notification Hubs and start the migration process for your application(s).
Developer Support/Feedback
We want to hear from you along every step of your migration journey and want you to try out the new Notification Hubs SDKs in your apps. We will continue to operate the App Center Push service until February 15th, 2021. We are here to help you through this migration process and encourage you to share any issues, concerns, or feedback through the Azure Notification Hubs repository.
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9 comments
AppCenter Push was super friendly for React Native projects, any plans on releasing a SDK for RN or at least a migration guide especially targeting RN apps?
Hi Jenny – Thanks for your feedback. The product group is looking into your request and will post an update on it shortly.
Sounds great! What does shortly mean, any time perspective on this update and where will I be able to find it?
What about the migration from Xamarin Forms? I do not understand why these instructions have to be so unclear. Can you please provide instructions for migrations for all the various platforms.
Hi James – Thanks for the feedback; the product team is looking into this request. Just for awareness, Xamarin bindings for our recently released preview SDKs are published – native Android is available here (with the iOS update coming shortly).
Any plan to implement a Xamarin.Forms specific SDK? There are external services wich are much easier to use with Xforms than Azure Notification Hub
How to migrate existing customers? Specifically: How to send a push notification to specific device which is identified by its appcenter installation id without appcenter push?
This issue is discussed at https://github.com/Azure/AzureNotificationHubs/issues/7
Still support cordova project ?
Like these
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/appcenter/sdk/push/cordova-android
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/appcenter/sdk/push/cordova-ios