Build-Test-Distribute Mobile Apps using App Center
As you know, Visual Studio App Center delivers a solid DevOps foundation for your app projects, delivering the cloud services you use build, test and deploy your apps. Many customers use App Center services inside their apps as well, collecting volumes of information from apps running in the wild through our Analytics service and capturing data on the rare application crash through Diagnostics. App developers and marketers engage with their customers in a variety of ways through the App Center Push service. So here Build-Test-Distribute Mobile Apps using App Center
In all, 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
As we listened to developers talk about what they put into their apps, and assessed the cool technologies Microsoft has in its portfolio, we knew we could do more for developers (and their apps) through App Center.
Identity – Many of our customers deploy apps that require the ability to uniquely identify application users. Some developers use custom (home-grown) identity providers, but most use third-party identity providers (like Facebook, Google, and Microsoft) to authenticate users. To accommodate these customers, we’re considering adding an Identity service to App Center which enables applications to authenticate users via username and password (custom authentication) or through third-party identity providers.
Data Synchronization – Many of our customers use home-grown or third-party data synchronization services in their apps. Use cases for these solutions range from simple offline caching of new records (with an automatic sync to the server when network connectivity exists) up to full offline synchronization of shared data across team members.
File Synchronization – Many of our customers include file sharing capabilities in their apps; allowing application users to attach files through the app and sync them with the server or enabling administrators to publish files to the server and synchronize them to relevant app users. To accommodate these use cases, we’re considering adding a File Sync service (backed by Azure Blob Storage) to App Center.
App Center helps you build, test, deploy and monitor your ios, Android, Windows, and macOS apps – All in one place.
Get started in Minutes – Connect your GitHub, Bitbucket, or Azure repos and set up your continuous integration, delivery and learning pipeline in minutes
Build in the cloud –Build Swift, Objective-C, Java, React Native, Xamarin, and UWP apps with every commit or on demand, without the headache of managing build agents.
Test on real devices – Test your app on thousands of real devices and hundreds of configurations in the cloud. Automate UI tests for your apps with popular testing frameworks.
Push live updates to your app –Ship hotfixes and new features using Code Push without having to resubmit to app stores. Ensure your users have the most up-to-date version of your app instantly.
Distribute apps instantly –Put apps in the hands of your beta testers and users on multiple device platforms – send different builds to different groups of testers and notify them via in-app updates.
Analyze and learn faster – Understand your customers’ app usage with analytics about your core audience—devices, locations, session info, language, and more. Export your data into Azure Application Insights and take advantage of advanced analytics features and custom queries.
Monitor your app health – Get real-time crash reports, notifications, detailed stack traces, and easy-to-read logs to quickly diagnose and fix problems in beta or production apps.
