Modern app development tends to use short code-test-release cycles. Here we discuss why this is difficult and how automation can make things easier.

App Center implements a full cloud-based CI/CD pipeline. This video gives a high-level overview of the six App Center services that make this possible.

Your App Center account stores all your configuration data, test results, analytics info, etc. This video shows you all the steps needed to set up an account.

We have provided a complete iOS/Swift application for you to work with during the course. This video gives you a quick tour of the app’s features. The provided app doesn’t have any App Center integration; that will be your goal as you work through the course.

The source code for the provided Minutes app is on GitHub. This video shows you how to fork the Minutes repo, clone it to your local Mac, edit the source in Xcode, and push your changes up to GitHub. This is a necessary setup step before you start working with App Center.

An App Center app holds all the settings and data for the App Center features you use. This video shows you how to create a new iOS/Swift app to represent the Minutes application inside App Center.

This section shows you how to configure App Center to automatically build your app every time you update the code in your GitHub repo.

This video gives a quick survey of the kinds of testing App Center can do for you.

App Center lets you use XCTest, the native iOS test framework, to write your unit tests. In this video, you’ll see how to code and run unit tests using Xcode. In the next section, you will run those tests in App Center.

Here, you’ll see how to run your XCTest unit tests in App Center automatically, every time you commit a new version of your source.

App Center has an SDK that you need to integrate into your application. Code from the SDK runs inside your app on user devices and provides services like sending crash reports up to App Center and intercepting incoming push notifications. This video shows you how to add the SDK to your Xcode project. 

App Center gives every app a unique identifier called an app secret. This lets App Center associate incoming messages with the matching App Center app. In this part, you will locate and copy your app secret.

When your application starts on a user device, you need to send your app secret to App Center and tell App Center which services you want to run. This video shows you how to use the App Center SDK to do this.

Your will eventually distribute your Minutes app to real iOS devices and send push notifications to your users. To do this, Apple requires that you create a Provisioning Profile in the Apple developer portal and integrate the profile into your Xcode project. This video shows you the steps.

App Center helps you get your app onto customer devices. You can send your app directly from App Center to a defined set of users or you can make it available to the public by having App Center publish it to the App Store. This video gives you a quick overview of the options.

App Center lets you send your app to directly to users for installation on their device. This is useful to get your app to your beta testers. In this video, you’ll see how to create a distribution group and invite users to join.

Apple requires that you register user devices in your developer account before you can distribute your app. Here, we introduce this concept and show what App Center does to make this easier.

App Center can create signed builds of your iOS application which it can then deliver to your testers. In this video, you will learn how to upload a provisioning profile and a certificate to App Center to enable this feature. You will also see how to create a signed build and how to send the build to a distribution group.

App Center can notify your users when a new version of your app is available. It will even include a link to let the users easily install the new version. This video shows you how to configure App Center and your info.plist file to enable this feature.

App Center Diagnostics automatically prepares a report when your app crashes and sends it to App Center for easy viewing. This video shows you an elegant way to force your app to crash so you can test the Diagnostics service.

To view crash reports in the App Center portal, you need to provide App Center with a dSYM file. This lets App Center give you meaningful information about the crash like source code file names and line numbers. This video shows you how to generate a dSYM file, upload it to App Center, and view a decoded crash report.

App Center Analytics automatically captures engagement data and limited demographic information. This video shows you how to enable the service and view the automatically-collected data in the App Center portal.

App Center Analytics lets you use custom events to gather detailed information about user behavior. This video shows you how to publish a custom event from inside your application and then view the event data in the App Center portal.

App Center can export your analytics data to Azure. This makes it easy to use Azure for long-term persistence or Application Insights for data analysis. This video shows you how to link your Azure account to App Center and configure the data export.

App Center uses Apple’s APNs to send push notifications. This means you need to enable push notifications in the Apple developer portal, in your Xcode project, and in App Center. This video shows you all the required steps.

App Center lets you send push notifications to targeted subsets of your users. This video shows you the properties you can test and the operators you use when defining these user groups.

This video shows you how to send a push notification using App Center. You will see how to define the data payload of the message, how to target a specific group of users, and how to dispatch the message to APNs for delivery.