Microsoft has added one more cross-platform mobile application to its toolset. Microsoft has just acquired a small German software company which specializes in crash analysis and beta testing of mobile applications. The company, HockeyApp is to be integrated into Microsoft’s very own Visual Studio Online, a hosted service for managing the lifecycles of applications being developed by teams of programmers.
Somasegar, Microsoft corporate vice president overseeing the company’s developer division, in a blog item posted Thursday announcing the purchase wrote, “Integrating HockeyApp crash reports with Application Insights usage analytics will extend device support for Application Insights across all major mobile platforms and make application analytics an ambient part of the application development cycle.”
HockeyApp’s service is based in Stuttgart, Germany and it offers services which greatly help in the development of mobile applications. Developers are given exhaustive reports of what went wrong and this information could be integrated with bug tracking systems. HockeyApp also serves as a platform for disseminating beta versions of apps, which collects user feedback on how well the app performs.
HockeyApp also gives a combined interface which can handle Apple iOS, Android and Windows Phone platforms with equal ease. It also serves Microsoft’s goal in recent times to build a development environment not only for Microsoft Windows, but for other platforms as well.
HockeyApp came into existence in 2011 and its services are much akin to Apple’s TestFlight, which Apple acquired in 2012 when it purchased Burstly. Apple had severed support for TestFlight for applications which so not run on iOS platform, something which will not happen with HockeyApp according to Somasegar.
Till HockeyApp is fully incorporated into Application Insights, developers have been asked to try the service as a stand-alone offering.
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