Iteration Plan for November 2019

[Oddj0b]

November 2019 Plan

October was an excellent month for UWP developers with the release of Diagnostics support, and you can see which crashes your customers are experiencing with your apps. In November, we will continue work on bring-your-own-identify for our Auth service, and in our SDK, the work continues to support last month's support for iOS extensions.

Auth

• Support bringing your own identity management provider (Firebase Authentication and Auth0) with App Center Auth [Bring your own identity management provider with App Center Auth #637]
• Enable developers to connect their Active Azure Directory to Auth [Enable developers to connect their Active Azure Directory to Auth #994]

Data

• Continue Free Tier investigatory work [ Investigatory work on Free Tier for App Center Data #799]
• Traffic Map in Metrics Explorer [Data Metrics Explorer  #660]
• Engineering Design Work on Data Change Notifications [Data Change Notifications in App Center Data  #1121]

Diagnostics

• Handled exceptions support for Android [Crashes.trackError(Exception ex) for Android #827, Support logging of caught exceptions #163 ]
• Support deobfuscation for R8/D8 [D8/R8 Support #698, AppCenter cannot deobfuscate Android R8 code #458]
• Show unsymbolicated crashes and include in total counts [View Unsymbolicated Crashes #110, "Unsymbolicated" "Issues" aren't included in "Crashes", and there is no filtering/sorting available #939 ]
• Process .so files for NDK Crash symbolication [Ability for AppCenter to process .so files for NDK Crash symbolication like how it used to work in HockeyApp #1160]
• Manually upload crash logs in the UI [Ability to manually upload iOS crash reports #289, Manually upload a crash log #1317]

Distribution

• Externally hosted builds
• Updated tester experience get a QR (or link) to a specific build/release #986, Link to Release on install.appcenter.ms #140, install.appcenter.ms sorts iOS and Android releases differently  #369, [IMPROVEMENTS] Add possibility to add custom/extra logs when crashes are saved #1176

General

• Custom apps platform support [Custom OS #464]
• Research for compute backend-as-a-service from App Center [Research for compute backend-as-a-service from App Center #993]
• Support Azure Active Directory security groups in App Center shared distribution groups

Test

• Add iOS 13 and Xcode 11 support to Xamarin.UITest [Xamarin.UITest support fo iOS 13 and Xcode 11 #1129]

[joshfriend]

Really hoping that #140 and related make it this time. HockeyApp will be dead next week and Appcenter is still missing this amazing feature that hockey offered for years.

[lbrownell-gpsw]

Custom apps platform support doesn't have an issue number, but it should include this: #464, which is one of the "we won't migrate your apps from HockeyApp on the 16th if they are affected by this" items.

Not clear if all the above are in that category, or some are non-blocking planned work (e.g., we can expect a monthly iteration plan going well into the future after HockeyApp is a distant memory; this iteration is special as there is a sort of drop-dead event in the middle).

[Oddj0b]

@lbrownell-gpsw thanks for the issue number, I've added it to the road-map.

[alfarahn]

Happy to see the handled exceptions on the RoadMap thanks for this @Oddj0b @winnieli1

[Fab1n]

What about thread names? In HockeyApp thread names for Apple platforms were displayed.
This is missing, too.

Before I want to give feedback on what will hurt when HockeyApp is taken down, I really want to thank you for your efforts you put into your work and also your open mentality about the plans for the different months, like the November plan.
I think you are really caring and listening to your customers and I want to honour that!

Not lets get to some honest feedback:
All in all, I must honestly say, we are still very disappointed about the feature set compared to HockeyApp.
The only problem is that you are shutting down HockeyApp while still some key features are missing.

If the shutdown happend while most features were implemented, this wouldn't be that much of a problem.

The things that are really hurting (because missing) when HockeyApp shuts down:

1. Cannot upload (Apple) crash reports manually (https://openapi.appcenter.ms/#/crash/textError_upload doesn't work - reports don't show up)
2. The crash logs are really bad to read
   • The logs are too bulky
   • The logs should instead be more like logs (these are text files)
   • There is so much space around everything in a report
   • For an example of how to make something like this look nice while still maintaining readability please look at how crashes look like in Xcode's Organizer window (or HockeyApp's crashlogs - but these were only easy to read and not looking that nice)
3. Thread names are not shown anymore (although the apple crash report delivers the names)
4. Dsym/build artefacts cannot be downloaded manually

This is not a complete list, though.

Please don't take this comment personally, it is not meant like that, though it is very difficult to describe missing features / things that you miss after using it for years without offending somebody.
But this is truly not the intent.

We are all professionals and we like to work professionally.
Removing features, that are in use daily, from a product kills productivity and because I am not the only one who will experience that I simply want to give you the most honest feedback I can give.

You need to know what your users think, in order to make your products better and better.
I hope this helps and I ask you to take this feedback like a professional, because we all are in the same boat.

I really would like to stay with AppCenter if it doesn't take that long to have kinda feature-parity with HockeyApp.

[marcoburato]

Before you start working on #698 #458 , could you have a look at #1360 ?
If you think it's a good idea, it could help structure the code in a way that makes it easy to implement that ticket in the future.

[rishimodha]

Is it possible to get #1319 included in this plan?

[lbrownell-gpsw]

MacOS platform still shows as "preview" in the UI, when adding a new app. Is that correct? What's missing? Does this impact transition from HockeyApp?

[Zee-day]

Can we get #32 in this one please?

[dipree]

@lbrownell-gpsw with Sparkle support macOS is out of preview. No impact for the transition.

[andrewtremblay]

If possible, finer grain support for notifications (like #1118) would be enormously helpful for orgs that have a lot of applications building.

[lbrownell-gpsw]

@lbrownell-gpsw with Sparkle support macOS is out of preview. No impact for the transition.

OK, so should probably change this:

EDIT: Done! Woot!

[winnie]

Hi @Fab1n - thanks for your helpful feedback!

1. Cannot upload (Apple) crash reports manually - have you opened a support ticket? Our engineering and support team can take a closer look for you.
2. The crash log are really bad to read - absolutely, we have a list of things on our backlog to improve our UI.
   3)Thread names are not shown anymore (although the apple crash report delivers the names) - I beleive you're referring to this issue iOS crash report missing "Application Specific Information" and thread names #857 ? Our team is working on this bug and it should be fixed very soon.
3. Dsym/build artefacts cannot be downloaded manually - do you mean in App Center Diagnostics? Or in our Build service? You can download your dsym files in Build and use our APIs too.

I'm more than happy to hop on a call or start an email thread if you'd like to chat more. We really appreciate you taking the time to relay this feedback. Thanks!

[Fab1n]

Hi @Fab1n - thanks for your helpful feedback!

1. Cannot upload (Apple) crash reports manually - have you opened a support ticket? Our engineering and support team can take a closer look for you.

No, I didn't until now. The UI for manual uploading is simply missing. We need this. But I think you already have it on your list, I just don't know how much of a priority it is.

2. The crash log are really bad to read - absolutely, we have a list of things on our backlog to improve our UI.
   3)Thread names are not shown anymore (although the apple crash report delivers the names) - I beleive you're referring to this issue iOS crash report missing "Application Specific Information" and thread names #857 ? Our team is working on this bug and it should be fixed very soon.

Awesome!

3. Dsym/build artefacts cannot be downloaded manually - do you mean in App Center Diagnostics? Or in our Build service? You can download your dsym files in Build and use our APIs too.

We don't build with AppCenter, we have a Jenkins instance and just upload the dsym files to AppCenter for each specific version.
If there is a macOS/iOS spindump, services like AppCenter/HockeyApp do not support symbolicating files like this.
These then need to be symbolicated locally. Therefor I need the symbol files for the exact build the spindump was created for.
In Hockey we could just download the dSym stuff for the build and were good to go.
In Hockey there is a tab called 'symbols' where I can download stuff, but I don't see the versions that are included in the artifacts.

I'm more than happy to hop on a call or start an email thread if you'd like to chat more. We really appreciate you taking the time to relay this feedback. Thanks!

Thanks for this option and your help! We'll better use that then.

[lacostej]

A little comment / request WRT automatically moving apps:

From: https://www.hockeyapp.net/blog/2019/11/16/hockeyApp-is-being-retired.html

All HockeyApp user and organization accounts have already switched to App Center. For apps
that haven’t been moved to App Center yet, we will start moving them over automatically. It will
take us a few months to complete the move of all apps. During that time, you can still move apps
manually by yourself.

Each of our products builds for multiple platforms, Custom OS being one of them. Our build/deployment system ties these related apps together.

So as of today, even if we could move some of the apps for a given product, we are not proceeding because we are waiting for Custom OS support to be available.

If AppCenter was to start moving automatically our apps per platform, it will break our operations.

Q: Is there a way to prevent this from happening? Once Custom OS is in place, we should be able to move rather quickly.

Thanks

[dipree]

@lacostej you don't need to do anything. We're not moving any of your apps. Custom OS support is coming soon, I'll update #464 once it's available.

[jbrozen]

Dsym/build artefacts cannot be downloaded manually - do you mean in App Center Diagnostics? Or in our Build service? You can download your dsym files in Build and use our APIs too.

And we also do this:

We don't build with AppCenter, we have a Jenkins instance and just upload the dsym files to AppCenter for each specific version.
If there is a macOS/iOS spindump, services like AppCenter/HockeyApp do not support symbolicating files like this.
These then need to be symbolicated locally. Therefor I need the symbol files for the exact build the spindump was created for.
In Hockey we could just download the dSym stuff for the build and were good to go.
In Hockey there is a tab called 'symbols' where I can download stuff, but I don't see the versions that are included in the artifacts.

We will also need these in the future. There's very little technical information around the build/releases exposed in AppCenter (like HockeyApp). Is there a gap analysis being done to ensure feature parity?

Thanks

[caisd1998]

Could you also add #1203 "IOS13 support with Appcenter using Appium 1.15"? Similar topic for iOS 13 test support.

[KS261187]

@caisd1998 I spoke to the App center support team to accelerate the upgrade but no luck as of now. They dont have anything planned up in the near future.

@Oddj0b we would like to understand the road map for the Appium upgrade which will help us to plan better.

Thanks
Krishnan

[lbrownell-gpsw]

December plan?

[Oddj0b]

December iteration plan is out #1494