Since our announcement of the Visual Studio Mobile Center Preview at Connect();,  we’ve had an amazing response from the developer community. I’d like to thank the thousands of you who’ve created accounts, kicked the tires of our lifecycle services, and provided feedback to help us create the simplest, most effective way to build, test, deploy, and monitor mobile apps from a single service.

As we head toward General Availability, we’ve incorporated that feedback into our roadmap, added new services, doubled down on existing services, and increased the size of our engineering team to make it all happen. Here’s an update of where we stand, and a preview of what’s to come.

Any developer. Any app. Any platform.

Mobile Center works with you, wherever you are, and whatever your toolset. Any iOS or Android developer working in Objective-C, Swift, Java, or React Native or Xamarin, you can take advantage of everything we offer, from continuous integration to testing to release management and analytics.

Complete mobile lifecycle management

Mobile Center is mission control for your mobile apps, designed to let you focus on apps instead of ops. How exactly do we do that? Here’s a look at our Beacon Services:

• Build automates cloud-based builds every time you commit code. You can even build iOS apps automatically, without a Mac.
• Test execute automated UI tests across operating systems on thousands of real-world devices with every Build. Test supports a range of frameworks, including Appium, UITest, Calabash, and Espresso. These tests integrate directly into your CI pipeline, so you know the results of your code changes almost immediately.
• Distribute automatically moves passing builds to beta testers or app stores.
• Crashes and Analytics provide detailed, real-time data about your apps in the wild, so you can identify emerging trends and fix bugs and performance issues before they become problems.
• Tables and Identity provide scalable backend authentication, sync, and storage solutions so you can focus on building your app, instead of the infrastructure around it.

What’s coming Next

We’re hard at work on all the features in our product roadmap. Future versions of Mobile Center will include expanded platform support for Universal Windows Platform and the Cordova framework, as well as push notifications.

Mobile Center is free during Preview. If you haven’t yet checked it out, sign up for free today.

Keith Ballinger, Director of Program Management for Mobile Developer Cloud Services Keith was previously the VP of Product for Xamarin, which Microsoft acquired in March of 2016. Keith has a strong background in entrepreneurship, engineering, and product management, dating back to his time as a PM on the original .NET team. Previous to Xamarin, Keith was the Chief Architect at the YC-backed startup Standard Treasury, building an API-first bank. He’s the author of two books on programming, “.NET Web Service: Architecture and Implementation” and co-author of “Special Edition: Using ASP.”