At the Microsoft Connect(); keynote in New York this morning, we made some significant announcements about Xamarin Test Cloud, namely that we now support the Appium framework and that Visual Studio Mobile Center (Preview) is the next generation of Xamarin Test Cloud.
A mission control for mobile apps, Mobile Center has all of the lifecycle and cloud services you need to ship high quality app faster. Mobile Center is the future of Xamarin Test Cloud and we could not be more excited about the new possibilities ahead of us.
As we’ve said many times before, Test Cloud was designed to help accelerate a continuous integration workflow. This direct integration into the rest of the lifecycle toolchain will enable us to deliver value to our users in brand new ways.
In light of today’s announcement, I wanted to take a moment to shed some light on what Xamarin Test Cloud users can expect as we continue the move to Mobile Center.
The Xamarin Test Cloud You Know
We know many of you depend on Test Cloud for your day-to-day operations. To avoid any interruption for you and your team, the existing Xamarin Test Cloud product will continue to function as it does today. All features in both the service itself and our test frameworks (Calabash and Xamarin.UITest) will be supported until we seamlessly transition you and your apps to Mobile Center when it GA’s next year.
Getting access to Mobile Center
In order to engage early with our users and begin gathering feedback, we have made Mobile Center available as a limited preview. During the preview period, Mobile Center is not considered suitable for production apps, which means that existing apps in Test Cloud cannot be synced with Mobile Center at this time. While you are welcome to request access today, note that you will need to create a new account and recreate your existing apps. At the end of the preview, we’ll provide a simple and painless way to migrate your entire operation to Mobile Center.
Welcoming Appium to the Lineup
While new feature development going forward will be delivered in Mobile Center, we wanted to provide Test Cloud users one long-awaited feature—today we are excited to announce support for Appium. Appium’s popularity has risen at meteoric rates over the past two years and the project has quickly become a household name in test automation. We will initially offer support for Appium tests written in Java with JUnit and will continue to expand support for other programming languages as we see demand to do so. To request support for other languages, vote for the feature in our request portal.
Appium works with your existing Xamarin Test Cloud subscription and will work seamlessly in Mobile Center once you have made the move in the future. Simply follow the instructions in the test run dialog to instrument your project with the requisite libraries for Test Cloud.
To the Future
The team at Xamarin has always been mission-driven to make it fast and easy to deliver incredible mobile experiences. We’re incredibly excited by the potential of this new chapter and hope you are, too. As always, we welcome all questions and feedback.
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