The Ship List: App Center January Update

Visual Studio App Center

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, such as the iPhone 8, iPhone X, Pixel 2, and others. At App Center, it’s always our goal to enable developers to build better applications and support the devices that they expect their users to own. With that said, we made sure to add iOS 11 support and a number of different iOS 11 configurations, along with 61 new phones across iPhone 8, 8+, and X.

For more detail on how to effectively test your app on iPhone X devices, check out Daniel Adam’s blog post on the subject here.

For those of you on Android, fear not! We also added Android Oreo support to our toolset and added 30 new Pixel 2, Pixel 2 XL, Galaxy S8 and S8 Plus devices to our device lab.

To get started with Oreo, you’ll want to check out Matthias’ post here.

Improvements to the Distribution Pipeline

We recently made improvements to streamline the app distributions process and remove redundancies. We now support distributing an existing build to a new distribution group without requiring you to upload the build again, saving you time and effort. For example, let’s assume that you’ve already distributed a release to your “Alpha Testers” distribution group. After they test and validate that the build is stable, you can quickly distribute the same build to another group of beta testers without the need to upload it again.

Added Support for Cordova

While there’s been a lot of great feedback and positive response from the launch of App Center, one request we heard loud and clear is support for Cordova apps. We’re happy to say that we’ve now added preview support for Cordova in App Center. When you create a new app, you should see it as a new option.

We currently have support for Test, Distribution, Crash, Analytics, and Push. Make sure to try it out and let us know your feedback, so we can continue on our quest for supporting any app, any dev, and any device.

Keep us posted!

This is only the beginning as we dig into 2018. We have a lot of great new features and updates planned in the coming months that we’re excited to share with you. Additionally, we’d love to hear your thoughts, how you’re using the latest features, and what you’d like to see next.

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