Looking for an App Center Alternative? BugSnag Has You Covered

As tech evolves, it’s no surprise when services boom and bust over time, leading to numerous retirements and sunsets. Recently, Microsoft announced the retirement of Visual Studio App Center, effective March 31, 2025. App Center is a reliable and straightforward tool for many developers, offering a suite of services related to CI/CD and distribution for mobile and desktop apps.

If you rely on App Center for diagnostics and analytics, this change might feel daunting and leave you wondering about your next steps. BugSnag is a dependable App Center alternative.

App Center Alternative Diagnostics & Analytics Alternative

In Microsoft’s App Center retirement announcement, they recommend using APM vendors like Datadog as alternatives for diagnostics and analytics. These backend tools are  valuable, but the developer-focused approach to BugSnag’s error and performance monitoring is better suited for teams that are tasked with creating high quality user experiences in their applications.

BugSnag is a powerful, user-friendly platform designed to help developers monitor and improve the quality of their applications. Let’s explore how BugSnag stands out as a preferredalternative for the diagnostics and analytics capabilities of App Center.

Diagnostics

One of the primary features of Microsoft App Center is its robust diagnostic capabilities, especially its crash reporting. With BugSnag, you get real-time error monitoring that catches bugs the moment they occur. BugSnag not only captures detailed stack traces but also provides context around the error, such as the state of the application when the error happened. This context includes breadcrumbs, which are the sequence of events leading up to the error, making it easier to pinpoint the root cause.

BugSnag’s error grouping feature automatically organizes errors by their root cause. This means you can avoid being overwhelmed by multiple reports of the same issue and can focus on addressing the most critical bugs first. This level of detail and organization significantly reduces the time it takes to diagnose and fix issues, ensuring your app runs smoothly for users.

To ensure a stable application, BugSnag assigns stability scores, which provides a quick overview of your app’s health. This metric is invaluable for maintaining high-quality standards and ensuring a smooth user experience.

BugSnag’s proactive error management features allow you to set up alerts and automation rules. You can customize these alerts to notify you of issues based on severity, frequency, or user impact. This proactive approach helps you stay ahead of potential problems, allowing you to address them before they affect a significant portion of your user base.

Analytics 

For many developers, the analytics provided by App Center have been essential for understanding how their apps are used and where improvements can be made. BugSnag also provides valuable data and analysis that are critical for improving your app. By understanding which errors occur most frequently and which users are most affected, you can prioritize your development efforts to have the most significant impact.

BugSnag’s user-centric approach also allows you to see how errors impact individual users. This detailed insight helps you identify patterns and trends that may be hard to find in aggregate data alone. For example, you might discover that a specific error disproportionately affects users on a particular device or operating system version. Armed with this information, you can make targeted improvements to enhance the user experience. 

Transitioning from App Center to BugSnag

Rip-and-replace is never pleasant, but transitioning your diagnostics and analytics capabilities from App Center to BugSnag will be simpler than you think -– and it’s worth it for the enhanced capabilities and insights BugSnag offers. Here are a few tips to make the switch smoother:

1. Evaluate Your Needs: Determine which features of App Center you relied on the most and plan which elements of BugSnag’s capabilities to focus on.
2. Download the SDKs: Implementing BugSnag’s error and performance monitoring capabilities are easy – just download each SDK to connect your application and you’re ready to start.
3. Leverage Documentation: BugSnag’s extensive documentation and support will help you integrate the platform into your existing workflow.
4. Start Slow: You can begin by using BugSnag for single projects to get the hang of things before expanding to more platforms.

Be Proactive – Prepare for App Center’s Retirement Now

The retirement of Microsoft App Center marks the end of an era, but it’s also the beginning of new opportunities with developer-first tools like BugSnag. With robust features and developer-friendly interface, BugSnag is poised to be an excellent alternative for your application error diagnostics and monitoring needs.

If you are looking for a tool that allows you to seamlessly catch, fix, and prevent errors and performance issues, sign up for a free 14-day trial, no credit card required. Want to see more? Sign up for a demo.