The right Visual Studio App Center alternative

With less than a month until Visual Studio App Center's retirement on March 31, 2025, many developers are looking for reliable alternatives to replace its core capabilities.

Microsoft's Visual Studio App Center has been an integrated app development lifecycle solution for mobile and desktop apps. It supported Android, iOS, Windows, macOS, Cordova, UWP, React Native, and Xamarin apps. App Center used to be a complete cloud-based solution, offering multiple services that helped developers with:

• CI/CD: Automating build, test, and release pipelines.
• App testing: Automating UI tests on thousands of real-world devices.
• App distribution: Distributing apps to beta users across multiple devices and platforms.
• Analytics: Analyzing in-app usage and user behavior across platforms and development phases.
• Diagnostics: Monitoring app health and debugging issues faster with detailed crash reports.

If you used App Center for any of these, you’re probably wondering—what next?

Find the right fit: Exploring App Center alternatives

When it comes to automating development tasks and pipelines, app testing, and distribution, you can consider tools recommended directly by App Center. They most likely do work well with your existing tech stack without disturbing your development workflows and require comparatively less effort to migrate.

Here's a recommended list of App Center alternatives:

The tools recommended for analytics and diagnostics are a good fit if you're looking for server-side applications, databases, network performance monitoring, and cloud observability for your IT and DevOps teams. But if your focus is on the nuances of mobile and desktop app performance, user behavior, and crash analysis—the kind of granular details that App Center offered—you need to reconsider.

Unlike App Center's more tightly coupled deployment features, the analytics and diagnostics components are modular. If you're looking for App Center alternatives primarily for those capabilities, you have a wider range of options to consider.

Here's what you need to keep in mind while evaluating other alternatives. They should:

• Cater to your analytical needs that working seamlessly without adding complexity.
• Offer analytics and diagnostics in one platform, considering the challenges of integrating and managing separate tools for crash reporting, user engagement, and analytics.
• Provide more flexible configurations and app-specific insights that you can customize later according to your needs.

Zoho Apptics: The right App Center alternative for mobile, desktop, and web apps

Zoho Apptics stands out as a comprehensive and reliable alternative to App Center. It's designed to deliver app analytics for developers without the complexity of enterprise-scale IT monitoring. It eliminates the need for multiple tools and provides core analytics and diagnostic capabilities in one platform, saving you time and money.

• Privacy-friendly product analytics tool: Zoho Apptics offers in-depth insights into app usage, engagement, performance, and growth in a single console– all while prioritizing data privacy.  
• Developer-friendly: It's designed for everyone involved in the app development lifecycle, yet it's a developer-friendly, pro-code solution at its core.
• Analytics for all development phases: Like App Center, Apptics supports cross-platform analytics through different stages of the development lifecycle. You can separate the in-app data for your apps in both development and production environments in Apptics.
• Initial setup: To get started with Zoho Apptics, you need to integrate Apptics SDK with your app so you can start analyzing app-driven insights. You can refer to our SDK documentation for detailed, platform-specific instructions. Here's the list of frameworks that Zoho Apptics supports:

User behavior and engagement analytics

With Zoho Apptics, you can analyze how users interact with your app. After the initial setup, you can start with usage and engagement stats like new devices, active devices, session duration, screen views, and in-app events that form the core app analytics data. Going further, you can view deeper insights into the user journey by grouping and segmenting users based on additional custom attributes.

Crash reporting and diagnostics

Zoho Apptics offers real-time error tracking and crash reporting capabilities, including fatal errors like crashes and ANRs, across platforms and environments.

Here's a quick breakdown of Apptics' crash-related features:

• App health monitoring: Track affected devices, app versions, and crash-free percentages and analyze key performance metrics for iOS apps.
• Crash reporting and analytics: Analyze detailed insights that include symbolicated crash reports and error logs, stack traces, threads, device details, crash environments, and other diagnostic information to debug and identify the root causes of issues.
• Mapping and dSYM file management: Automatically upload and manage your debugging and symbols files for proper symbolication or deobfuscation of crash reports.
• Crash grouping: Apptics automatically tracks each crash instance, groups them based on stack traces, and provides unique fingerprints for each crash. This means that you can save time triaging crashes and look into the unique issues behind those crashes.
• Issue management: Prioritize crashes based on severity. You can comment, tag, and assign team members to resolve them promptly.
• Breadcrumbs: Drill down further and analyze session data–API, event, and screen traces—to understand what actually happened.
• AI analysis: Get AI-powered crash summaries, insights, and suggestions that help with crash analysis and debugging.
• Remote logging: Access application logs to simulate and reproduce bugs and issues remotely. 
   

In-app feedback and bug reporting

Another important aspect of analytics and diagnostics is addressing problems shared by your users. Your users can share feedback with Apptics' in-app feedback feature, along with screenshots, attachments, screen recordings, device and console logs, and more. This helps you analyze the contextual feedback received and address issues promptly. You can also look into diagnostics information, device details, and session data (similar to errors) to resolve and fix bugs immediately.

Notifications and alerts

Get instant notifications on crashes, ANRs, non-fatal errors, feedback, and bugs reported for your app in your dedicated Zoho Cliq or Slack channels, in addition to regular email notifications. 

Other capabilities

Apart from analytics and diagnostics, Apptics has a lot more to offer. It has features and prebuilt functions that exist as plug-and-play modules. They include in-app updates, in-app ratings, remote configuration, store reviews, custom properties, push notifications, and more, which can be configured and enabled anytime according to your requirements. You can learn more about these features on our feature page. 

Migration from App Center to Zoho Apptics

Regardless of what tool you choose and which decisions you make, migrating your analytics and diagnostics might seem daunting at first, but it can be a smooth process with the right tools. 

Here are some simple steps you can follow to streamline your migration from Microsoft's App Center to Zoho Apptics:

1. Assess your requirements: Identify which App Center features you rely on the most and map them to the corresponding Apptics functionalities. This helps you prioritize what to focus on during the transition.
2. Explore Zoho Apptics: Integrate our SDK to unlock the full potential of Apptics and refer to our detailed guides to understand any platform-specific requirements during the initial setup.
3. Reach out for support: Don't hesitate to get in touch with us. Our team is here to help you, understand your requirements, and guide you through achieving them through Apptics.
4. Roll out in phases (recommended): It's okay to take it slow—one step at a time. For a less disruptive transition, consider implementing Apptics in stages. Familiarize yourself with the new platform and validate your initial setup.
5. Map your metrics: Compare your previously tracked data points in App Center to their counterparts in Apptics to ensure consistency. Explore various modules and their capabilities to see if you need any customizations.
6. Refine and optimize: Closely monitor your analytics and diagnostics data, then tweak configurations as required for better insights.

Migration tip:  We recommend you start migrating to Zoho Apptics at least a month before App Center's retirement to avoid any historical data loss and simplify the transition process. 

Reason: As per App Center's data retention policies, you can retain analytics and diagnostics data only for the last 28 days. In Apptics, you can retain error and engagement data for a minimum of 30 days (free plan) and a maximum of 5 years (pro plan). A proactive migration approach ensures a continuous flow of insights and eliminates the need to export and import data.

With App Center's retirement fast approaching, now is the time to explore a seamless alternative. Zoho Apptics enhances analytics and diagnostics for your app while ensuring a hassle-free transition.

Ready to make the switch? Schedule a one-on-one demo to see Apptics in action!