App Center Blog
The latest news, updates and information for mobile developers using Visual Studio App Center
Latest posts
Private Preview for App Store Connect API support
App Center is introducing JSON Web Token based authorization to Apple Developer Connection. You no longer have to renew your connection every 30 days using credentials, 2FA, and App Specific Password. Additionally, you will be able to set access levels for the keys in the Apple Developer Portal. While App Center will continue supporting the session-based authorization, we encourage you to try out using App Store Connect API key. Find a host of new features and improvements in the App Store Connect API release notes for your internal development and testing. If you would like to try out App Store Connect API in...
Deprecating macOS 10.15 image in App Center Build
Microsoft-hosted Pipelines recently announced image deprecation in Azure Pipelines. Accordingly, we want to update App Center customers on the upcoming change in our build image support. If you are building iOS or Xamarin apps using , or or below versions, you will be impacted by this change. We recommend you update your build configuration to another Xcode or Xamarin version prior to October 2022. After this date, any build running on images will be re-routed to . Please reach out to support if you have any questions. We would be more than happy to assist you. Resources
Public Preview for App Center Build Export
App Center Build makes it easy for mobile developers to get started with building their apps - in many cases with just a few clicks. But this focus on simplicity also means that customers who need more complex builds end up outgrowing App Center Build and have a hard time figuring out where to go next. Whereas there are other tools in the broad Microsoft ecosystem to achieve that, there was no easy way to export App Center Build configurations and migrate them over to another tool. We are excited to introduce a new capability to migrate your existing App Center Build configurations over to Azure Pipelines. Now...
App Center Analytics & Diagnostics Data Retention
Mobile developers use App Center Analytics to gain insights into their applications’ users and their usage and use App Center Diagnostics to monitor their applications’ health and dig into unexpected failures. We are committed to keeping these services healthy and reliable, and as part of that we are making some changes to our data retention policies. Today, Analytics and Diagnostics data is retained for 90 days by default, with very few caps on the volume of data generated per application. This has led to unsustainably high data volumes across these two services. Today we are announcing a scaling back of the...
Deprecating macOS 10.14 image in App Center Build
Microsoft-hosted Pipelines recently announced image deprecation in Azure Pipelines. Accordingly, we want to update App Center customers on the upcoming change in our build image support. If you are building iOS or Xamarin apps using , , or or below versions, you will be impacted by this change. We recommend you update your build configuration to another Xcode or Xamarin version prior to December 2021. After this date, any build running on images will be re-routed to . Please reach out to support if you have any questions. We would be more than happy to assist you. Resources macOS-10.14 Image c...
Announcing Apache Cordova Retirement in App Center
Since App Center launched in 2017, we’ve added support for 16 platforms and frameworks. One of the first was Apache Cordova, a cross-platform framework that wraps JavaScript apps in a native container. Along with React Native, it was one of two frameworks to support CodePush and exactly what the community needed as many developers transitioned their skills from web to mobile apps. Since then, the needs of the community have changed just as Cordova’s popularity has waned. Today calls from the Cordova SDK account for less than 1% of App Center’s service. Consequently, after a 6 month grace period, App Center wil...
Run Tests on Android and iOS Beta Versions
We understand the pain and struggle to address unexpected issues before the next release of the major OS version. As exciting as it is to try new features in advance, the struggle to identify compatibility issues over a night is real. We heard your feedback, and now we are super excited to announce beta version support in App Center Test service. App Center Test Supports Beta Versions 🎉 Starting from today, App Center offers you a way to try pre-release versions of Android and iOS prior to the final release. You can try beta versions with your application in the physical devices, and test drive new features wi...
Deprecating Xcode version 11.0, 11.1, and 11.4 in App Center
![Ela Malani [MSFT]](https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/85b217684cae99c4069b0139bf354be7?s=96&r=g){kind=avatar}
This September, Visual Studio App Center delivered build support for Xcode 11.7, 12.0, and 12.2 beta. In the process of expanding our Xcode support, we also investigated how many customers were using older versions. We discovered that our community currently builds between 2-4% of apps using Xcode 11.0,11.1 or 11.4. Therefore, we have decided to focus on supporting most commonly used Xcode versions. Effective November 5, 2020, we are ending support for Xcode versions 11.0, 11.1, and 11.4.We recommend you update your build configuration to another Xcode version prior to November 5, 2020. After this date, any bui...
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 A...
Announcing MBaaS Service Retirement
![John Wargo [MSFT]](https://devblogs.microsoft.com/appcenter/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/2019/02/user-1290-150x150.png){kind=avatar}
We are discontinuing efforts in the Auth, Data and Push services and working to retire these preview services in App Center. With this change, we will focus App Center on delivering a world-class mobile and desktop DevOps experience.
Updates to macOS Build Agents
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As apps move to build on the latest and greatest sets of build tools, we have seen a dwindling demand for building on High Sierra.
A Bite-Sized Daily Digest for Crashes in Visual Studio App Center
We’re excited to announce the launch of a daily digest for crashes in Visual Studio App Center! This bite-sized email gives you a single view of your daily activity of new crash groups.
HockeyApp is being retired
HockeyApp has officially retired.
HockeyApp Transition to Visual Studio App Center – October Update
Visual Studio App Center is still closing important feature gaps as HockeyApp is in the process of transitioning to App Center. See what we’ve been working on in October and learn more about what we’ve committed to on our roadmap.
October Updates for Visual Studio App Center’s Windows Support
This month, we’re excited to announce the General Availability support for WPF and WinForms applications, targeting both .NET Framework and .NET Core 3.
Securely Access, Visualize and Manage your Mobile App Data with Data Metrics View and Data Explorer capabilities in Visual Studio App Center
The App Center Data Explorer allows you to engage directly with and manage your data in the App Center portal. You have complete control over your Data. You can create, read, update, and delete documents directly in App Center. Previously, this was only available through the App Center Data client SDKs and the Azure portal.
HockeyApp Transition to Visual Studio App Center – September Update
Visual Studio App Center is closing important feature gaps as HockeyApp is transitioning to App Center later this year. See what we’ve been working on in September and learn more about what we’ve committed to on our road map.
Using the Android App Bundle with Visual Studio App Center
We’ve heard you loud and clear that being able to build and distribute AABs to supporting stores is important to you, and so we’re happy to announce that Visual Studio App Center supports building AABs for all supported Android platforms.
New Dark Theme Available on Visual Studio App Center
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Thanks to you taking the time to request features via our Github repo, we are excited to announce that dark theme is available in App Center.
PLCrashReporter Maintainership Moving to Microsoft
We’re happy to announce that Microsoft is moving PLCrashReporter to the Microsoft organization on GitHub to continue supporting this valuable project. Of course, the licensing of PLCrashReporter won’t change and we are looking forward to continuing to support the project.
HockeyApp Transition to Visual Studio App Center – August Update
Visual Studio App Center is closing important feature gaps as HockeyApp is transitioning to App Center later this year. See what we’ve been working on in August and learn more about what we’ve committed to on our roadmap.
HockeyApp Transition to Visual Studio App Center July Update
App Center is closing important feature gaps as HockeyApp is transitioning to App Center later this year. See what we’ve been working on in July.
Announcing WPF and WinForms Support in Visual Studio App Center
Today, we’re excited to announce the preview release of the App Center WPF and Windows Forms SDK, enabling support for diagnostics, analytics and distribution for apps targeting .NET Framework.
Visual Studio App Center, User Identity, & Shared Devices
The user identity capabilities of App Center enhance how you interact with your app users and allow you to more easily troubleshoot issues when they arise We’ll continue to add capabilities to App Center to enhance what you can do for your app users,
Announcing GitLab Support for Visual Studio App Center
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A first step to building your app is to select a source provider. As a crucial step in the build process, we are always hoping to make this as seamless as possible. To continue this mission, we are excited to announce the completion of our top feature request for the past few months - support for GitLab.com as a source provider!
Exploring the Visual Studio App Center Data Roadmap
App Center Data combines the mobile focus and “magic” of App Center with the scalability and power of Microsoft’s NoSQL database service known as Cosmos DB. You can completely control your data with the confidence it will always be available.
Expanding the Visual Studio App Center Network with OneSignal
Developers can now look to OneSignal for configuring an integration with App Center Analytics. OneSignal users can choose to send their analytics events to App Center, which delivers powerful querying tools to integrate events across your app and your infrastructure, with SQL-like querying.
JSON Web Token and React Native Support Arrives to Visual Studio App Center Auth
We shipped App Center Auth in early preview on May 7, and it’s been an exciting month and a half since our launch! During this time we’ve actively engaged with our developers and rolled out a couple of product improvements based on your feedback.
Three SDK Tips To Get More From Visual Studio App Center Analytics
In this post, I’m going to share how you can best leverage and utilize client-side APIs supported in the App Center SDK to have control and flexibility on storing, prioritizing, and sending the Analytics data to App Center backend.
App Center Build Adds Cloning of Existing Build Configurations
Over the course of the last few months, we have heard your feedback that you would love to use your existing configured branches as a basis for new build configurations. We’re excited to let you know that one of several improvements coming to our Visual Studio App Center Build service is the ability to clone build configurations from existing
Visual Studio App Center: Changing the Way you Handle App Data
Data. We’re aiming to solve some of the biggest problems associated with data. The App Center Data service, currently in preview, lets you manage, sync, and persist your application data in the cloud across different devices and platforms in both online and offline scenarios. Whether it’s global data that every user can see or private account
Moving from Node.js to .NET Core
Here on Visual Studio App Center, our platform is built as a set of microservices, which has afforded teams to make language and platform choices that work best for them, and ultimately allowed us to move and iterate quickly
Introducing Push to User for Visual Studio App Center
We made some recent changes to Visual Studio App Center that enable our customers to associate app users with their data in App Center. App Center customers can use this user association to send push notifications to specific users through App Center Push. In this article, I’ll explain how it all works.
Introducing Visual Studio App Center Auth
For the past few months, the team has been working to develop a seamless identity management service to easily manage user identities at scale in Visual Studio App Center. Today, we’re really excited to launch App Center Auth in early preview!
Visual Studio App Center Preview: Welcoming Auth and Data to the Portfolio
![James White [MSFT]](https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/fe50459a0701d4f4a8016a9fdf948c38?s=96&r=g){kind=avatar}
App Center Data and Auth are available as an early preview, we will share more details in the next couple of weeks about what is available and what to expect in the future. In the meantime, we invite you to log into App Center, check out what is available today, and share your feedback.
Improvements to Visual Studio App Center Distribution
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Earlier this year we started an effort for widespread customer outreach to understand our users and guide product prioritization. The effort helped us gain a lot of insight and helped our prioritization last quarter. However, as we continue to grow, we unfortunately don’t have the capacity to reach out to as many customers as we would like.
Faster Android Tests and NUnit 3
Xamarin.UITest is a popular C# testing framework which works great with both native and cross-platform apps, using frameworks like Xamarin. Today I’m happy to announce two updates we have made to the UITest framework, in the form of a performance boost for cloud tests and adding NUnit 3 support both locally and in the cloud.
Become a Dev Rockstar by Learning About your Users with Visual Studio App Center and Azure
App Center works seamlessly with Azure so you can export your user data to Azure and analyze it there to learn more about your users. Let’s first take a look at some real-world scenarios where customer data analyzed over a long period of time helps organizations provide better experiences for their customers.
Microsoft’s Developer Blogs are Getting an Update
In the coming days, we’ll be moving our developer blogs to a new platform with a modern, clean design and powerful features that will make it easy for you to discover and share great content. This week, you’ll see the Visual Studio, IoTDev, and Premier Developer blogs move to a new URL – while additional developer blogs will transition over the coming weeks. You’ll continue to receive all the information and news from our teams, including access to all past posts. Your RSS feeds will continue to seamlessly deliver posts and any of your bookmarked links will re-direct to the new URL location. We’d Love Your Feedb...
Growing the Visual Studio App Center Service Portfolio
There’s a lot you can do in your apps using App Center, but we also know our customers use other services in their apps as well. Successful apps typically identify users using a third-party identity service or the less popular username and password approach. These apps usually manage some sort of application data, whether it’s the user’s data shared across multiple devices or data shared across multiple users, groups, or even whole companies or divisions. Data in this context means structured or unstructured data as well as binary data such as files.
Introducing Diagnostics Search and User ID support
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When releasing a new version of your app, you might get user complaints about crashes they’re experiencing in the new version. As a developer, you want to find the root cause as soon as possible to minimize the number of users affected. However, if you have millions of users, this could result in millions of crashes. Finding crashes would be like looking for a needle in a haystack.
Going Public (With Our Plans)
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Starting now, we’re opening the doors and letting all of you in, you now have a front row seat to our product planning process. Following the Visual Studio Code model, we published all our current product plans in the App Center GitHub repository.
Give Your Crashes a Context through Logs Attachments
This is a guest post by Jean-Marie Alfonsi, Freelance Software Architect. At the dawn of the app era, crash reporting was a dull and heavy work. You needed to manually retrieve your crash from your smartphone system, put some context in it and then send it to your custom web service. Being in the golden age of apps, we are now pretty spoiled with various ecosystems and continuous integration platforms, as they do all the heavy lifting for us. In terms of features and ease of use, Visual Studio App Center is one of the top players for app DevOps and is a must-have in a Xamarin environment. It does a tremendous ...
A New Year Ahead – the HockeyApp Cutover Experience
Starting today, you can get started with your transition from HockeyApp to App Center through the side-by-side experience. We’ll also update you with full documentation and details on completing your migration to App Center in March 2019 to enable all of our users to complete moving over all apps by November 16, 2019.
Creating Memories with Better DevOps for Unity Games in Visual Studio App Center
2018 has been a big year for Visual Studio App Center, with all the updates and releases. It has been especially exciting to work with the game developer community to provide better tailored services for your needs. Here are some of the highlights from 2018, mainly for Unity developers, as well as a glimpse into what we have in store going into the next year, for game developers in App Center. Beginning the Journey at GDC 2018 App Center’s gaming journey began at the Microsoft booth at the annual Game Developers Conference in San Francisco in March of 2018. We knew developers had found success using HockeyA...