Visual Studio App Center
- appcenter.ms
- Build, test, distribute, diagnostics, analytics, auth, data push mobile applications.
- Automate & manage the lifecycle of iOS; Android, Windows and macOS applications.
- Connect to your repositories & automate your builds
- Test builds on real devices in the cloud
- Distribute apps to beta testers
- Monitor real-world usage with crash and analytics data
- Enable get feedback from users on the new features
- 📝 It’s used to:
- Manage mobile target device sets and distribution groups
- Managed target UI test device sets
- Provision tester devices for deployment
- Create public and private distribution group
Distribution groups
- Controls access to releases
- Set of users e.g. QA Team, Canary users etc.
releases, such as Staging.
- Release the application to users via distribution groups
- Types 📝
- Private: Invited by e-mail to test application
- Public: Unauthenticated users, download application with a link.
- Shared: Shared across multiple applications in a single organization.
- Created at organization level, not application level.
- Device registration - example for iOS application
- Devices have to be specified in the provisioning profile for the application
- App Center will help register the tester device IDs into the Apple Development account
- You will need the
.p12 certificate which was used to sign the application at build time.
Releasing an application
- Android
- Ensure you have updated the manifest and have a correctly configured Gradle build.
- In Android Studio, choose Build > Generate Signed Bundle / APK and follow the steps in the wizard to build the app bundle or APK.
- iOS / macOS
- ❗ Register each testers devices on Apple Developer portal as test devices.
- In Xcode, go to Product > Archive to archive your app.
- Export the archive using the proper provisioning profile.
- Windows:
.appx, .appxbundle, .appxupload, .msi, .msix, .msixbundle, .msixupload, or .zip
- Other OS:
.zip