Visual Studio App Center is your continuous integration, delivery and feedback solution for Android, iOS, Windows, and macOS apps, enabling you to ship higher-quality apps faster and with greater confidence.
App Center is a continuous integration, delivery and feedback cloud service that helps you ship better iOS, Android, Windows, and macOS apps, faster. It brings together the beta distribution and crash analytics features of HockeyApp and the Xamarin Test Cloud ability to run automated UI tests on physical devices in the cloud. It provides cloud build services so that you can have “continuous integration” running for every code committed to a branch, without the headache of managing your own local build machine. App Center also provides app usage analytics and the ability to segment users and send them push notifications. You can choose to use just one of the services as part of your app development lifecycle, or combine them into a complete CICD process.
Build in the cloud
If you’re the only dev working on a project, you may just build everything locally. When there is a team of developers working on a project, you might prefer centralized build support. Instead of maintaining your own lab infrastructure, connect App Center to your source code repository and have it do builds for you. Builds can be triggered manually, or you can use Continuous Integration to have App Center build every time new code is pushed to the branches you specify.
Test on real devices
Testing your app locally on an emulator is different than running it on a real device. App Center can deploy your tests, along with your application, to real devices. It captures screenshots at the test steps you define, and provides complete logs of the test run. This gives you access to thousands of real devices and hundreds of configurations (a specific device model with a specific version of the OS).
App Center supports popular frameworks such as Appium, Espresso, and XCUITest. Test every UI interaction your users can do, and diagnose bugs and performance problems every time you build, with detailed step-by-step tracking reports, screenshots, and logs.
Deploy everywhere with ease
App Center helps you distribute your app to beta testers and users on iOS, Android, Windows, and macOS with every commit or on demand. Send different builds to different groups of testers and notify them via in-app updates. When ready, release to Apple’s App Store, Google Play, and to Microsoft Intune. To install on iOS devices, you must first register the device with your Apple developer account and add it to a provisioning profile. When the app is signed based on that provisioning profile, it can be installed on those devices. Attempting to install it on another device will fail. App Center streamlines the process of gathering the necessary device identifiers from testers, performing the registration and signing. Android apps do not require the extra device registration step prior to signing.
Insightful crash reports
Monitor the health of your app with advanced capabilities such as intelligent crash grouping and management, faster debugging with symbolication, and detailed crash reports. Get notified and fix issues as they come up.
You can enable your app to send crash errors to App Center. The crashes are processed to identify groups of the same type of crash. The stacktrace helps you identify where in the source code the crash is occurring. The App Center SDK is modular, so that you can avoid adding overhead to your app for SDK functionality you aren’t using. The SDKs have been open sourced on github.com in the Microsoft organization.
Real-time analytics
Grow your audience by focusing on what’s important with deep insights about user sessions, top devices, OS versions, behavioral analytics and event trackers for your iOS, Android, Windows, and macOS apps. Easily create custom events to track anything.
App Center analytics helps you understand your users. The single-line integration provides information about how many users are using the app. When the app is installed, it’s assigned a unique identifier used for analytics.
The App Center SDK is modular. To enable gathering and sending analytics data, add the module in the
App Center shows the distribution of sessions, devices, countries, languages and app version. It also provides the distribution of OS version. For Android, the API level is shown. Countries are identified by the carrier country provided by the platform. Language is based on the user’s system settings. You can filter by version and time range.
Push live updates to your app
Visual Studio App Center combines the power of CodePush with cloud-hosted builds, automated UI tests, crash reports, analytics, and push services. With this integration, we are doubling-down with CodePush development. Get all the features you use today and new resources you need to ship five-star apps, faster - All in one place.
Support
App Center supports Objective-C, Swift, Java, Xamarin, React Native and more.
We're just getting started and have big plans for helping you deliver better iOS, Android, Windows, and macOS apps faster.
