microsoft/appcenter

Keep App Center alive

pravinmadhavan87 opened this issue · 11 comments

pravinmadhavan87 commented

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/appcenter/retirement

I am lost for words over the news that App Center is being retired. Many users rely heavily on App Center for the building, testing and distribution of their apps.

This is a feature request to reconsider a decision that will affect thousands of end users, testers and developers who use App Center every day.

EatonZ commented

It is sad, but it seems MS' heart is elsewhere now. There haven't been many meaningful updates in a long time.
Big thanks to the AppCenter team for all the work they put in! Analytics & Diagnostics have been very helpful to me and it is a shame to see it go.

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pravinmadhavan87 commented

I am very appreciative of all the hard work the App Center team has put in, but decisions like these make it hard for developers to ever trust and invest in any new solutions Microsoft put out.

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Xynratron commented

That is very unfortunate. Had someone at Microsoft Xamarin/MAUI in mind? They only mention iOS & Android in the retiremant information.
The Microsoft Partner Center seems not to be updated in years and looks very abandoned.

Is .net MAUI dead already?

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cjrvdev commented

I guess since the Xamarin rebranding chaos to .net and the many shutdowns in microsoft solutions there are many reasons for my clients to disbelieve microsoft. Its a constant snowball of shutting down services and platforms issues.
EDIT: To me MAUI is DOA, there is no way it can be better than KMP or Flutter anymore

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thomasgalliker commented

Guys, I‘m sharing your toughts 100%. AppCenter is/was a very valuable tool and our team was also very surprised to hear the news of its retirement. Does anyone know the reason behind this decision?

No matter what happens, .NET has a huge and very capable developer community. I‘m pretty sure soon we will see new solutions to replace AppCenter in the near future, trust me.

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cjrvdev commented
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brzezinol commented

@jfversluis Gerald, could you help us in understanding Microsoft decisions all around Xamarin and Maui? Our clients starting to avoid Ms technologies because of uncertainity of supporting services. Many people here have many questions today aboud App Center.

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AntonPetrov83 commented

Hi!

Can anyone share his thoughts on how to use Google Play or App Store Connect for testing internal dev-builds without occasionally promotiing it to the production?

We do mobile games and our dev-builds contain code not intended for production like cheats, developer UIs etc.
Usually we used App Center for distributing these "dangerous" builds to internal testers.

How are we assumed to do that then?

brzezinol commented

I implemented own server for apk distribution.
It is not complicated thing.
Also implementes ABIs selection for apk, so files are smaller.
In app you must implement requesting package installer thats all.

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RahulSDeshpande commented

@brzezinol

I implemented own server for apk distribution.

That is cool!!
Can you share more details??
Is it some open source tool??

brzezinol commented

@RahulSDeshpande
there is no opensource solution, I wrote simple mvc app for distributing files for customers, apps, and releases.
In this case there are apk files.
In Android app you need to implement process of:

  • request update info
  • download file from your apk server
  • invoke package installer after file is downloaded.
    all of this things are available in web.

I could help you in some details if you have problems.