App Center: Continuous Integration and Delivery for iOS

Learn when and how to leverage Visual Studio App Center to automate and manage the lifecycle of an iOS application.

Think about the last time you released an app. How many sessions did your beta testers run? How often did your app crash? Where did users spend the most time? Visual Studio App Center automatically gathers this data for you and consolidates it into a single web-based dashboard. It also provides a complete continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD) solution for your iOS and macOS applications. You connect your repo to App Center and it builds your apps on cloud-hosted agents, automatically runs unit and UI tests on real devices, and distributes them to beta testers and app stores. After deployment, App Center helps you monitor your apps with crash reports and advanced analytics. It even lets you send targeted push notifications to keep your customers engaged.

This project-based course shows how to automate your iOS development process using the features provided by App Center. Discover how to start with a provided iOS Swift application and gradually incorporate App Center services. By the end of the course, you will have a native iOS Swift app with a fully-integrated CI/CD pipeline.

1. What Is App Center?

• Code more, manage less
• What is App Center?
• Create an App Center account
• Mac setup

2. The Sample Application

• Introducing the sample app
• Fork the sample app GitHub repo

3. Build

• Add an iOS/Swift app to App Center
• Build your app in App Center

4. Test

• Testing in App Center
• Create a unit test with XCTest
• Run your XCTest in App Center

5. SDK Integration

• Add the App Center SDK to your Xcode project
• Identify your app to App Center
• Start the App Center services

6. Distribute

• Create a provisioning profile
• Distribution with App Center
• Create a distribution group in App Center
• Register a device in the Apple Developer portal
• Distribute a new release
• Enable in-app updates

7. Diagnostics

• Generate a test crash
• Upload debug symbols for your crash report

8. Analytics

• View analytics reports
• Track custom analytics events
• Export analytics data to Azure

9. Push

• Configure push notifications
• Define a push audience
• Send a push notification