App Center Blog
The latest news, updates and information for mobile developers using Visual Studio App Center
Latest posts
Looking for Buddybuild Alternatives? Try 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 Nativ...
Boosting Productivity, Quality, and ROI with Automated CI / CD
Mobile development moves fast, and it’s hard to stay on top of your game without losing productivity. From Machine Learning to Computer Vision to whatever else comes next, mobile developers are expected to learn and implement emerging technologies as they arrive, without missing a deadline. To make that work, you need to claw back time. In my years of experience as an enterprise mobile app developer, the best way I’ve found to do that is by automating CI/CD. During my time at Xamarin and Microsoft, I’ve watched a myriad of companies reach the same conclusion. In this post, I’ll share some of those stories that...
Continuous Quality: Ship Better Apps Faster with Visual Studio App Center
Think about one of your mobile apps... How often do you publish updates to it? A couple of times per year? Quarterly? Monthly, bi-weekly? Every day? Multiple times per day? No! That's crazy, right? Or is it? Some world-class app engineering teams are able to consistently release their apps weekly or every two weeks at high quality. How do they manage to do that? Part of the explanation is commitment to a continuous delivery process in some form. Let’s look at some of the benefits and challenges of continuous delivery, and, more importantly, why this is accessible to everyone. You don’t need to be a venture-back...
Continuous Quality: Ship Better Apps Faster with Visual Studio App Center
Think about one of your mobile apps... How often do you publish updates to it? A couple of times per year? Quarterly? Monthly, bi-weekly? Every day? Multiple times per day? No! That's crazy, right? Or is it? Some world-class app engineering teams are able to consistently release their apps weekly or every two weeks at high quality. How do they manage to do that? Part of the explanation is commitment to a continuous delivery process in some form. Let’s look at some of the benefits and challenges of continuous delivery, and, more importantly, why this is accessible to everyone. You don’t need to be a venture-back...
Customer Spotlight | How Quora Empowers Its Developers to Make an Impact
With over 200 million monthly visitors (and growing), Quora is a platform that enables people from around the world to learn and share knowledge across millions of topics and interests. The company focuses on rapid iteration to create a high-quality user experience, and their development team’s advanced deployment processes are critical to their continued success. They’ve kept their development team extremely lean as they’ve grown over the last eight years, guided by three key principles: With hundreds of daily releases across platforms, continuous automated testing is uniquely important. Visual Studi...
Customer Spotlight | How Quora Empowers Its Developers to Make an Impact
With over 200 million monthly visitors (and growing), Quora is a platform that enables people from around the world to learn and share knowledge across millions of topics and interests. The company focuses on rapid iteration to create a high-quality user experience, and their development team’s advanced deployment processes are critical to their continued success. They’ve kept their development team extremely lean as they’ve grown over the last eight years, guided by three key principles: With hundreds of daily releases across platforms, continuous automated testing is uniquely important. Visu...
Guest Blog | The What, Why, and How of App Store Optimization: Lessons from the Ground
This is a special guest post from David Drobik, co-founder at Rapid and business development lead for STRV. If you’re anything like me, you might remember the good old days of mobile app development: you designed, coded, submitted to the Apple App Store or the Android Market (way back in the time, before it was Google Play), and downloads came your way. Maybe it wasn’t easy, exactly, and still required hard work, high quality code, and thoughtful marketing, but it was nothing compared to now. In 2018, the mobile app game requires equal parts amazing UX, fast release cycles, and a strategic approach to g...
The Ship List: App Center January Update
The New Year represents an exciting time for those of us on the App Center team, after our launch last November at Connect(); and seeing your initial reactions over the past few months. We haven't rested after the launch, however. We have been hard at work improving App Center, listening to your feedback, and looking at how we want the product to evolve in the future. Without further ado, here are the new features you'll find in App Center that have shipped since GA. Test on the Latest iPhone and Android Devices Last fall brought with it not only the launch of App Center, but a new wave of flagship devices, su...
The What, Why, and How of Mobile DevOps with Visual Studio App Center
With constant operating system releases, ever-shifting user expectations, and new form factors launching every year, making sure your apps are high-quality, take advantage of the latest technology, and deliver features that win users’ loyalty can feel like multiple full-time jobs. The solution: mobile DevOps and automation, so you’re freed to focus on building new features and improving your users’ experience, not manual processes. Enter Visual Studio App Center, which brings all the cloud-hosted services you need to simplify and automate your Android, iOS, UWP, and macOS development pipeline into one easy-to-us...