Visual Studio App Center
Frequently Asked Questions
General
Visual Studio App Center lets you automate and manage the lifecycle of your iOS, Android, Windows, and macOS apps. Ship apps more frequently, at higher-quality, and with greater confidence. Connect your repo and within minutes automate your builds, test on real devices in the cloud, distribute apps to beta testers, and monitor real-world usage with crash and analytics data. All in one place.
Account & Billing
Security & Privacy
- Any apps installed during a test run are uninstalled
- All local storage is cleared from the device
- Devices are restored to their default settings
As a result, your tests and data are always running on a clean device, with nothing left over for other customers to find.
Compatibility
Features
We currently provide Build, Distribute, Crashes, and Analytics support for iOS, Android, macOS, and UWP apps. We currently provide Test support for iOS and Android apps.
Please refer to our public roadmap for additional platforms on the horizon.
- Espresso for Android apps
- Xamarin.UITest for Xamarin cross-platform apps
- XCUITest for iOS apps
Appium may be a good choice for teams with either Appium or Selenium experience or for teams with non-Xamarin apps that desire cross-platform tests.
You can also distribute your app via a public URL. If you enable the Public Download Page, anyone with the URL and whose UDID is in the provisioning profile will be able to access and download the app.
The Apple Developer Program lets you distribute your apps through the App Store and for testing purposes through ad-hoc distribution. This kind of distribution is limited to 100 UDIDs per device type (iPhone, iPod, iPad, Apple Watch, and Apple TV).
The Apple Developer Enterprise Program is intended for in-house distribution of your enterprise or line-of-business apps without the need of collecting UDIDs. It cannot be used to submit apps to the App Store.
Please note that it is your responsibility to comply with Apple’s terms and conditions.
App Center offers two ways to export your data: standard export and custom export. Standard export will allow you to export the data with a one-click experience, using the azure subscription linked to the app. Custom export will provide you with more flexibility and the configurations will be customized in Azure.
App Center Analytics allows you to continuously export all your Analytics data into Azure Application Insights (Azure Monitor). Application Insights is an application performance management (APM) service that offers querying, segmentation, filtering, and usage analytics capabilities over your App Center event data. By adding the App Center SDK to your app and exporting the data into a App Center app-type Application Insights resource, you will get access to the following features:
- Application Insights Analytics. Use a powerful query language to analyze your raw event data and create visualizations. You can export the results of your queries into PowerBI or Excel.
- Users, Sessions and Events. Learn how many people are using each page and feature of your app, then segment by country, browser, or other properties to understand why.
- Funnels and User flows. Understand how users navigate through your app. Identify bottlenecks. Discover ways to increase conversion rates and eliminate pain points.
- Retention. Discover how many users return to use your app. Find out where and why they drop out.
- Workbooks. Create interactive workbooks that combine usage analysis visualizations, Application Insights Analytics queries, and text to share insights on your team.