Here comes a big news for mobile applications developers. CodePush, the service for distributing Apache Cordova, React Native, and Windows Mobile updates to applications, has now become a part of Visual Studio Mobile Center.
Because of the extraordinary feature of help deploying quick bug fixes, feature improvements, and content updates via the cloud, CodePush has been quite popular among the app developers, since its inception a couple years back. This is why Microsoft has now encapsulated it in the Visual Studio Mobile Center rather than keeping it a stand-alone project.
What Microsoft
says about this service is,
“CodePush-enabled applications dynamically update their JavaScript code either automatically or on-demand, thus empowering developers to provide incremental updates at-will.”
Source: microsoft.com
Also, the company has described the CodePush update lifecycle via
a blog post.
“A typical CodePush update lifecycle works like this -
- You publish your app to the store with both native and JavaScript code bundled together. We’ll call this version 1.0.0 (0) where the parenthetical represents the CodePush release number.
- Your customer installs your app from the store.
- After changing your JavaScript, you release update v1.0.0 (1) to the CodePush service hosted in Azure. Notice the CodePush release number has incremented to “(1)”.
- On any app event (e.g. onresume), the app queries the CodePush service to compare the JavaScript bundle installed on the device to the most recent one available in the cloud.
- If the cloud version is both higher and matches the native code version, then it downloads and installs the newer update.”
Now, when being integrated with
Visual Studio Mobile Center, the CodePush Service is empowered with more functionality, and it has become a part of Mobile Center Dashboard too to compliment the other services in the suite and to provide developers with a point-and-click interface for managing apps and deployments.
Source: miscrosoft.com
For future plans, the company writes, “Currently we have a lot of plans for CodePush including but not limited to better integration with our crash service – which currently provides js stack traces for iOS – and bundle signing. In the coming months, we at Mobile Center will also be striving to provide further support for additional platforms both for CodePush and other services.”
You can visit the official blog to learn more about it.