App Center Blog
The latest news, updates and information for mobile developers using Visual Studio App Center
Latest posts
Feature Flags Give Crash Reporting a Serious Boost
Integrating feature flags with your App Center crash service allows you to reduce the impact of crashes. Such an integration makes investigating crashes quicker and easier and allows for almost immediate rollback of problematic features.
Improved App Distribution is Here: Redesigned Tester Experience, Distribution Statistics, and More
Getting your release installed on a user’s device is the most important part of the distribution process. We've been working on incremental improvements to our tester experience since launching App Center in 2017, but after months of interviews and feedback from hundreds of customers, we’ve completely overhauled the user experience and visual design for our tester install portal.
Visual UI Testing for Android Apps with Espresso and Visual Studio App Center
This is a guest post from Daniel Puterman, engineering lead at Applitools. Suppose you’ve built a new Android app and want to build some visual test automation scripts to ensure that it appears correctly on the devices it might run on. Not all the Android devices out there — just the top 20 for now. Suppose further that your app isn’t all that complex; just ten screens, with an average of ten visual elements each. And you won’t check every last attribute of those visual elements, just five: x, y position, height, width, and text. Simple, right? Unfortunately, no. If you apply traditional functional testing ...
Export To Application Insights With AppCenter Continuous Export
Five-star mobile apps have one special feature: they don’t let go of their users. This can be achieved by understanding your app, the app’s users, and how these users interact with your app. The deep customer insights offered by AppCenter's Continuous Export provide a better understanding of your customers and help boost retention. By default, you receive information about your active users, their active sessions, top devices, country, language, and more! Additionally, with just a few lines of code, you can also track custom events like user log-in or items added to a cart but not purchase. This post will look i...
From Code to Google Play: Release your Apps Automatically with Continuous Delivery
We are embracing a world where thermostats automatically adjust and sprinklers automatically water, why shouldn’t your releases be automated? Continuous delivery is a natural extension of continuous integration. It allows you to develop faster, collect feedback earlier, and ultimately produce happier customers. We have received feedback from numerous customers asking for the capability of releasing a build directly to the store. We introduced the ability to automate the process to release your app directly to app stores for successful builds, without the need to do any manual work. You don’t need to worry abou...
The Ship List: Visual Studio App Center June Update
Intro With June closing out, we also come to the end of the industry’s spring conference schedule. After multiple developer events around the world we have a vision of the future of mobile and the exciting new things to come. We joined many of you in the developer community at AltConf and, along with it, had a couple of new updates to share. Without further ado, let us dive in to what is new for Visual Studio App Center: auto-provision devices for distribution, automatic publishing of your iOS and Android app builds to the store, and free training resources for iOS developers. Auto-Provision iOS Devices for Fa...
Distribute Android Apps Faster with Visual Studio App Center
Whether you’re working on an early proof of concept, or a beta of an Android app used by hundreds of millions of people around the world, the ability to get your app in the hands of testers is a critical part of the product development cycle. Being able to quickly iterate, distribute, measure, and learn is the best way to create a great app your users love. Staying in the know about crashes in your app and being able to collect feedback on what your users do and don’t like is equally important to the success of your app. In this post you learn about the new improvement of our distribution feature and how you can ...
iOS Development Course: Learn How to Automate Your iOS Development Lifecycle
Course co-authors, Adrian Stevens and Mark Taparauskas, also contributed to this blog post. Building great Objective-C and Swift apps that your customers can rely on takes time and effort. It's important to test early (and often) to verify new code works as expected and doesn't accidently break existing features. Once your users have your app, you want to ensure it runs well and that your users enjoy your exciting new features. Visual Studio App Center makes it easy to automate builds and run tests every time your code changes. It also simplifies distribution to testers during development and to the App Store ...
Announcing Auto-Provisioning: Build and Distribute Apps Faster
Getting your app onto your own device, or in the hands of potential testers, can be one of the most time-consuming challenges when developing an iOS app. To install an app on a single device, you must register the device with Apple and sign the app with the relevant provisioning profile. While this isn’t much of an issue for a single device, you need to register and re-sign the app each time you install the app on a new set of devices. For a developer, this repetitive action is a huge loss of time; for a tester, it’s a disruptive experience to receive an app and not be able to install it because your device hasn’...