Earlier this year, Microsoft announced<\/a> the retirement of the preview MBaaS services in Visual Studio App Center, which include Auth, Data, and Push services. Today we\u2019re providing an update on the App Center Push retirement timeline and details to help you migrate to Azure Notifications Hubs.<\/p>\n We will retire App Center Push on February 15th, 2021 to give you sufficient time to migrate. We\u2019re 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.<\/p>\n App Center Push customers recognize that there are some differences in experience between App Center\u2019s offering and Azure Notification Hubs. As we prepare for your migration, we\u2019ve 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<\/a> and iOS<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n Here are a few\u00a0key\u00a0features of\u00a0the\u00a0Azure Notification Hubs\u00a0SDK.<\/p>\n 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<\/a> and now automatically handles device registration for push notifications once you add the SDK to your app and enable push.<\/p>\n To enable a more personalized notification experience, targeting a specific user or a set of users and devices for a given application is key.\u00a0App Center Push uses\u00a0audiences to help developers and marketers target application users in different ways. Notification Hubs customers have a similar capability\u00a0with\u00a0Tags.\u00a0The benefits to using tags is that you can have richer expressions with custom tag expressions\u00a0as well as near real time targeting.<\/p>\n You can add\u00a0custom\u00a0tags to a\u00a0device\u00a0installation,\u00a0which allows for\u00a0developer specified\u00a0audiences\u00a0potentially\u00a0defined by app\/OS\u00a0version,\u00a0language, country,\u00a0device\u00a0model\u00a0etc.<\/p>\n App Center Push\u00a0allows\u00a0you to associate users\u00a0with devices,\u00a0and with the new Notification Hubs\u00a0SDK,\u00a0you can\u00a0achieve the same\u00a0result\u00a0by\u00a0setting a custom\u00a0userID\u00a0property\u00a0tag.<\/p>\n With the\u00a0Azure Notification Hubs SDK, you can set up a listener\u00a0and\u00a0be notified whenever a push notification is received in\u00a0the\u00a0background\u00a0(silent push notification),\u00a0or an alert\u00a0has been clicked by the user.<\/p>\n A\u00a0background synchronization manager\u00a0ensures\u00a0that\u00a0when\u00a0a device is offline,\u00a0all\u00a0installation\u00a0changes are tracked\u00a0and once network connectivity is re-established,\u00a0they are synchronized with the\u00a0service.<\/p>\n Just like App Center Push, the Notification Hubs SDK allows applications to enable or disable push. When disabled,\u00a0push tokens are not refreshed but\u00a0pushes are still received\u00a0until the current\u00a0token\u00a0expires.<\/p>\n To help you get started, we\u2019ve created a\u00a0push migration\u00a0guide<\/a>\u00a0that\u00a0walks\u00a0you through how to setup\u00a0and use\u00a0Azure Notification\u00a0Hubs\u00a0and start the migration process for your application(s).<\/p>\n 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\u00a0repository<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" 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\u2019re 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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1297,"featured_media":38034,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-39577","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-mobiledev"],"acf":[],"blog_post_summary":" 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\u2019re 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 […]<\/p>\n","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/appcenter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39577","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/appcenter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/appcenter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/appcenter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1297"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/appcenter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=39577"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/appcenter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39577\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/appcenter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/38034"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/appcenter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=39577"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/appcenter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=39577"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/appcenter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=39577"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Migrating to Azure Notification Hubs<\/h3>\n
SDK\u00a0Highlights<\/h3>\n
Device Registration<\/h4>\n
Notification\u00a0Targeting\u00a0with Tags<\/h4>\n
Tags\u00a0for Installations<\/h5>\n
Tags for Users<\/h5>\n
Alert\/Silent\u00a0Notifications<\/h4>\n
Online\/Offline\u00a0Sync<\/h4>\n
Enabling\/Disabling Push<\/h4>\n
Getting\u00a0Started with Notification\u00a0Hubs<\/h3>\n
Developer Support\/Feedback<\/h3>\n