I’m excited to announce our acquisition of HockeyApp – the next step in our journey to turn Application Insights into the best tool in the world for helping you get insight into your applications.  With HockeyApp we add great support for mobile devices, allowing you see more of your application and helping you answer: 1) Is my application available/reliable? 2) Is my application performing? 3) Is my application succeeding – allowing my users to accomplish what they intend and delivering on my business goals?

HockeyApp brings a fantastic solution for:

• Crash reporting – Fast and precise crash reporting with easy app integration, rich crash analysis and support for connecting directly to existing workflows and bug tracking systems.
• Distribution and feedback – Beta distribution and built-in user feedback system.

And HockeyApp provides fantastic support for mobile platforms – iOS, Android and Windows Phone.

In the coming months, we will integrate this into our overall Application Insights offering to provide you a 360 degree view of your applications.  While that happens, the existing HockeyApp product continues to be available, exactly as before and we’ll ensure that customers have a great experience as we evolve HockeyApp and Application Insights together.

I’ve been around long enough to know that some people will ask “Does this mean iOS and Android support in HockeyApp will become second class and ultimately be deprecated?”  I answer emphatically “No, it does not mean that!”.  The primary reason for us to acquire HockeyApp is to add an industry leading Android and iOS solution and to bring in critical iOS and Android talent and experience.  We have committed to supporting all the major mobile platforms as first class citizens.  You can see proof points in this ranging from great Office support for Android and iOS to new developer innovations – like our partnership with Xamarin, Cordova tooling, our recently announced Android emulator, cross platform C++ support with Clang and LLVM, Azure support for Linux, our recent announcement of open sourcing the .NET server framework and our commitment to Linux and iOS support, and I could go on.  It’s not one or two things – it’s a consistent pattern of embracing open source and the multi-platform, multi-device reality.

So expect our Application Insights support for Android, iOS, Linux, Java, Azure and the family of Windows devices to all be first class.  That’s my commitment to you.

I encourage you to try out HockeyApp now.  You can get started for free.  You can also get started with Application Insights today.

I am excited to welcome the HockeyApp team into our family and to take this next step in providing the best development tools on the planet – to all developers.  Try it out; as always, we look forward to your feedback.

Brian