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👋 Goodbye AppCenter, it’s been a pleasure!
Microsoft has recently announced that their popular mobile app distribution service is scheduled for retirement on the 31st of March of 2025. From now until then, the service will still be available but the team will no longer work on new features and will only fix critical bugs.
If you’re new to iOS development or if you work on your own apps, the chances that you have used Microsoft’s service are slim. Despite this, you must know that it still is a popular choice for many companies to distribute their pre-release and test builds, in fact, two of my previous companies used it.
But why did companies not use a native solution like TestFlight in the first place? While it has improved massively over the past few years, TestFlight has been historically slow to process builds and hard to sign devices to run internal pre-release builds of a specific app.
So if you had to constantly deliver builds to your stakeholders or testers, TestFlight would slow you down a bit, while other services such as AppCenter would excel at this, making it an obvious choice for companies.
So… if your team uses AppCenter, what should you do now? Where should you distribute your internal builds to now? Read on because I have the right resource for you 👇
🚨 AppCenter is getting retired… now what?
Microsoft recently announced that the popular mobile app distribution service AppCenter is scheduled for retirement on the 31st of March of 2025.
If you’re currently using AppCenter as your build distribution solution, I would encourage you to start looking for alternatives as soon as possible. A great resource to do so is this article from Gabriel Savit where he compares the top pre-production and beta app distribution tools on the Runway blog.
📈 Automated code performance benchmarks
Benchmark tests are a great way to make sure a piece of code runs efficiently and that subsequent iterations of such method do not cause performance regressions.
With the new Benchmarks Swift Package by Joakim Hassila, you can now make these checks part of your unit tests and set baselines you can check code performance against automatically on your CI workflows!
🌟 Tuist’s CI migration to Codemagic
I really enjoyed reading this article by Pedro Piñera on the Codemagic blog about how they migrated Tuist’s CI workflows over to Codemagic and made their builds faster and more reliable in the process!
✂️ Making your apps smaller with dynamic frameworks
The Emerge Tools blog is the gift that keeps on giving! I particularly like their deep-dive analysis of live apps and I always learn something new when I read their articles.
This time Jacob Bartlett goes through how you can use dynamic libraries when sharing code across different targets to avoid asset and code duplication and, as a consequence, keep your final binary size as small as possible.
🚨 How to access the new ASC analytic reports
Apple has recently introduced over 50 new analytics reports with hundreds of new data points and metrics to help developers understand how their apps are performing.
This new data is only available through the App Store Connect API and the way to query it is fairly complex. For this reason, I have written a step-by-step guide to help you start generating and reading these reports for your apps!