Overview

Important

Visual Studio App Center is scheduled for retirement on March 31, 2025. While you can continue to use Visual Studio App Center until it is fully retired, there are several recommended alternatives that you may consider migrating to.

Learn more about support timelines and alternatives.

Visual Studio App Center brings together multiple common services into a DevOps cloud solution. Developers use App Center to Build, Test, and Distribute applications. Once the app's deployed, developers monitor the status and usage of the app using the Analytics and Diagnostics services.

This section describes the basic concepts of App Center and ways to manage your account settings.

Set up your App Center account

Apps

To get started, add an app to your App Center account or accept an invite to someone else's app. You can have different permission levels for each app: Developer, Viewer, or Manager.

Organizations

Create an Organization to invite Collaborators and Administrators to work on your apps, and manage their permissions.

Teams

Create Teams within your organization to better manage large organizations and permission settings.

Manage your account preferences and settings

Account Profile Photos

App Center uses Gravatar to manage user profile photos. To get started, create a Gravatar account using the same email for your App Center account. Once your account has been created, follow the instructions on Gravatar's website to pick your new profile image. When you return to App Center, refresh the browser to see your new profile photo. If your new profile photo doesn't immediately appear, hard refresh your browser to replace the previously cached image.

Email Notifications

Manage your email preferences to sign up for automatic notifications for builds, distributions, and crashes.

Bug Tracker Integration

Integrate bug trackers like Jira, Visual Studio Team Services (VSTS), Azure DevOps, and GitHub to stay informed when your app crashes.

Webhooks

Create and enable webhooks to integrate with third-party applications you already use.

Slack App

Install the App Center Slack app to easily trigger builds, monitor your app, and invite new testers directly from Slack.

Manage App Center's theme

Dark theme (Preview)

App Center can be used with a Dark theme. Under your account settings, go to the User Interface section to enable dark theme. Currently, dark theme is only available in Preview.