Microsoft Retires App Center – What’s Next?
Microsoft recently announced that it is shutting down its App Center product in March 2025.
If you’ve been a customer of App Center, this likely doesn’t come as a surprise. A few years ago Microsoft dropped support for Cordova in App Center, signaling to developers that Microsoft was no longer prioritizing maintaining the product.
If you’re a current App Center user, you may be wondering what to do next. Microsoft does provide a list of services that you could migrate to, each with their benefits and drawbacks. As you consider migrating to a new tool, we may just have the perfect solution for you.
What does this change mean for you?
By shutting down App Center, the burden of building and releasing your mobile app is now being placed on you. If you’ve never maintained a release process for a mobile app, it can be quite complicated, and it often requires that you have dedicated hardware for iOS. Not only that, but as new OS versions are released, you’ll need to make sure you update your build process to account for any new settings or changes in how each platform builds. This can be frustrating as it adds another layer of work on top of actually building your app.
An alternative to App Center
Luckily, if you do not want to adopt this rather manual process, you have options. In looking for a suitable replacement for App Center, the core functionality that most developers want to replace is the native binary build process. If that sounds like what you need, Ionic’s Appflow may just be the best solution.
Appflow is a mobile CI/CD service (aka cloud build service) from the team behind Ionic Framework and Capacitor. Appflow fully supports Cordova, Capacitor, React Native, and native iOS/Android apps out of the box, and provides managed and secure build environments for iOS, Android, and the web. Additionally, Appflow enables real time remote app updating similar to App Center’s CodePush as well as direct publishing to app stores without platform dependencies. Appflow also supports different distribution channels for QA, so you can deploy to TestFlight or Play Console just as you would expect.
This means that teams can focus completely on building the features of their apps without having to stress about their mobile CI/CD platform being shut down.
If you’re interested in learning more about moving from Microsoft App Center to Appflow, create your free Appflow account today or contact one of our App Development Specialists.
About Ionic
Ionic is the leading cross-platform developer solution with 5 million developers worldwide. It powers 15% of apps in the app store, not including thousands of apps built internally at enterprises for every line-of-business need. Ionic is unique in that it takes a web-first approach, leveraging HTML, CSS, and Javascript to build high-quality iOS, Android, desktop, and Progressive Web Apps.
Ionic is a leader in enterprise app development. Thousands of enterprise customers use Ionic to build mission-critical apps for their customers, both external and internal.
