App Center: Build, Test, Distribute and Monitor Apps in the Cloud | Hacker News Reader

App Center: Build, Test, Distribute and Monitor Apps in the Cloud

blogs.msdn.microsoft.com

66 pointsdstaheli27 comments

Hi - author of the blog post here and PM on the team!

We are very proud of what we've built here. Regardless of how you built your app (Swift, Java, React Native, Xamarin), we offer CI, releasing to your beta users and the app stores, Crash reporting, analytics, and even push messaging. Let us know your thoughts!

> Regardless of how you built your app (Swift, Java, React Native, Xamarin)

Any word on Cordova support? All those Ionic apps (which uses Cordova in the background) would feel very at home at App Center...

Oh, just saw that https://appcenter.ms mentions Cordova:

> Even more! macOS, tvOS and Cordova

But can't find it inside...

Interestingly, the new deeper HockeyApp integration recognized that my apps were built with Cordova, but then just shows a "Cordova support coming soon" page for Android and iOS. (The Windows Cordova app was recognized as UWP rather than Cordova. The Windows Electron app I have wasn't recognized at all, but that is unsurprising.)

Nothing in the transition roadmap from HockeyApp :/ https://www.hockeyapp.net/appcenter/roadmap/

On the main App Center Roadmap [1] they have Cordova CodePush dashboarding mentioned, but not build support.

[1] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/appcenter/general/roadmap

They don't yet support it and I don't think they will have strong Ionic integration as we haven't talked with them about it.

However, we recently rolled out Ionic Pro which is similar to App Center, but focused 100% on Ionic apps. Adoption so far has been strong despite only being out a few months, and we're investing a lot in the product. Hope you give it a try and we're excited to have some extra validation from App Center!

http://ionicframework.com/products

Very cool. Any plans to add support to server side apps for Azure?

We are highly focused on rich client apps right now, especially iOS and Android, but also Windows and macOS.

Feel free to reach out to me and we could discuss your scenarios in more detail. There are other tools that may fit your scenario better.

This seems…great?

Why did Microsoft create this? Specifically, I'm not interested in the "because we love developers" story, I'm interested in the "this is strategic for Microsoft now and for the next decade because" story.

The team is extremely passionate about creating developer productivity tools. App Center's creators include the founders of HockeyApp, Xamarin Test Cloud, and CodePush. This is something we were all iterating towards individually, and when we met up at Microsoft, we realized we now had the team and ability to make it happen.

Microsoft is very serious about creating amazing developer tool across any app, platform, and language for a variety of reasons. Making Azure the most productive place to power your app is part of it, of course. But, in the long run, the easier we make development, the more the world benefits.

What a lovely nonanswer.

Seems like it's to get more people on Azure. Doesn't look like it works with AWS or GCP.

You need golang on that toolchain. It is arguably the language of the cloud at this point.

Thanks, that makes a lot of sense to see this from the background of HockeyApp, Xamarin Test Cloud, and CodePush coming together. Ignore the non-answer guy, this is a totally sufficient answer in my opinion.

Why did they create it? It's $40 - $99 a month for premium usage and has the potential to make tying in with other MS products like azure, easier. Seems like plenty of reason to me.

Yes, it's important to look at all of Microsoft's new products through the "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish" lens.

It's a paid service that integrates with other paid Azure services. It's strategic for Microsoft because you give them money.

Here's a scenario I'm dealing with that must be fairly common. A mobile app running against an Azure backend, where users can also access the app through a SPA on their desktop. I don't want my analytics data spread out over multiple analytics services, so can this analytics service support SPAs as well? Bonus points for being able to track the same user across mobile + SPA.

Right this second, we offer the ability to export your analytics to Azure Blob Storage, and Application Insights, where you can then join the App Center analytics with other data.

We are looking at what we can do to make the SPA + mobile workflow super easy, though. Stay tuned on this. In the meantime, feel free to reach out to me as I'd love to ask you some more questions.

Looking forward to hearing about this. On a similar note, why not collect errors from the backend and SPAs too... after all a stack trace is pretty much a stack trace wherever you are. I get that this isn't the market you're serving, but if you don't do this your user is likely to end up using two very similar error reporting services for the same project.

Product page: https://appcenter.ms

Notably, support for https://github.com/Microsoft/react-native-windows, the React Native plugin for building UWP apps, is missing, which is a bit of a curious omission for a Microsoft product.

Anyone here have experience working with react-native-windows? How's the experience compared to React Native for Android/iOS?

We are investigating what it would take to support RN with Windows. I'm a huge RN fan (and we include CodePush inside of App Center.) If you have a moment, shoot me an email as I'd love to ask you more about your scenarios.

Looks pretty good, but a lot depends on implementation. The testing on devices is cool, but $100 a month is a lot... especially since many developers don't make that much off their apps.

Most of the services are free. You don't have to use the test service if it is outside of your budget. For instance, you could push your successful builds directly to beta testers, if you'd like.

We've gone out of our way to make sure everything in the product is accessible via our REST API, and we also have a CLI you can install from npm.

Just curious, why is the testing so expensive? I've seen other products that provide this same testing service and they are all very expensive. Is it because of the hardware required, an ROI thing, a first to market thing, or something else?

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