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Microsoft is pulling the plug on Visual Studio App Center. The company has published a retirement notification on the Microsoft Learn website detailing the upcoming discontinuation of the service on March 31, 2025. App Center will remain supported for one more year, so expect it to receive critical bug fixes and technical support. However, Microsoft will block user sign-in and API calls after the specified date.
For those unfamiliar, Visual Studio App Center is a set of cloud tools and services that help developers create, test, distribute, monitor, and maintain applications on Windows, iOS, Android, and other platforms.
Besides warning about the upcoming end of support, Microsoft published a list of alternatives for different parts of Visual Studio App Center. They include the following:
| App Center Capability | Recommended Alternative |
|---|---|
| Build | We recommend migrating your builds from App Center to Azure Pipelines, leveraging the Export App Center Build feature. |
| Test |
For app device testing, we recommend BrowserStack App Automate. BrowserStack provides access to 20,000+ real iOS and Android devices. BrowserStack has developed the Device Testing CLI to support migrating from Microsoft App Center to BrowserStack App Automate.
You can find the full guidance for migration to BrowserStack here. |
| Distribution |
We recommend Apple’s AppStore for iOS app production releases and Apple’s TestFlight for iOS app test releases. For Android applications we recommend Google Play for production releases and Google Play Console for test releases.
Azure Pipelines tasks can be used for distributing to AppStore/TestFlight and Google Play.
For Microsoft Store applications, we recommend using Package Flights feature available in Partner Center. |
| CodePush | We have prepared a special version of CodePush to integrate into your app and run independently from App Center. If you’d like to get access to the codebase of this CodePush standalone version, please reach out to our support team at [email protected] for more information. |
| Analytics and diagnostics |
We recommend one of the Azure Native ISV services which provide rich capabilities for mobile analytics and diagnostics. By leveraging these Azure Native ISV services, you will be able to monitor your complete stack from device to your backend infrastructure on Azure.
Click on each link below to see the documentation for Azure Native ISV service of your choice.
Microsoft Store app developers can access analytics & diagnostics data through Partner Center Dashboard. Additionally, UWP applications published in Microsoft Store can log custom events through the Microsoft Store Services SDK. |
You can find more information about Visual Studio App Center on its official website, which does not mention any discontinuation plans.
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