App Center Retirement: open-source/license distribution platform?

[Brantone]

We've relied heavily on the distribution functionality of AppCenter. No other solution offers centralized support for such a wide spectrum of platforms for pre-release binaries. This combined with "direct to device" install and distribution group segmentation, has proven not only extremely valuable but also very difficult to replicate.

Would Microsoft consider open-sourcing/licensing segmented pieces of AppCenter to run self-hosted??

[marwalsch]

Would Microsoft consider open-sourcing/licensing segmented pieces of AppCenter to run self-hosted??

I second this for Crash Reporting specifically. The SDK's ability to capture fatal app crashes including stack traces without symbolification across all platforms is invaluable. Not even paid alternatives offer this while integrating this well with .NET-iOS & .NET-Android.
Honestly I'd rather Microsoft had turned it into a paid product instead of retiring.

[OsmanCelik1978]

Branch-based beta distribution feature is available on Appcircle but Crash report and Analytics feature is not available.

[Brantone]

What about making it an Azure app?

[r0bbie]

I'd love to have seen App Center go open source so it could have lived on, but understandably Microsoft are steering people towards their other platforms in Azure DevOps / GitHub!

Regarding the distribution capabilities of App Center, I'm part of the team at Buildstash and we're really focusing on it go way beyond App Center's cross-platform support (over 50 platforms explicitly supported across mobile, desktop, games, XR, etc). And for those who've migrated to Azure Pipelines or GitHub Actions we have integrations. In case this is helpful to anyone coming across this issue still looking for a solution :)