Update on transitioning Mobile Apps from Application Insights to HockeyApp

Since we announced our transition plan for Mobile Apps to HockeyApp from Visual Studio Application Insights, we received feedback from our customers expressing concerns about the features that are in Application Insights but currently unavailable in HockeyApp. After considering the feedback, we have decided to make changes to our plan. While HockeyApp will continue to be our main offering for mobile apps, we will provide important functionality in Application Insights that will allow customers to access and perform in-depth analytics on device telemetry. This is an initial step towards our goal of enabling correlation and analysis across service and device telemetry data in Application Insights – making it the place to analyze across your solution.

Specifically, the changes we are making are as follows:

• Application Insights will continue to support a “device type” application for iOS, Android and all Windows applications. You can continue to use Application Insights for your existing mobile apps and will be able to create new apps soon. The Analytics and “Continuous Export” features will be supported for “device type” apps in Application Insights. The Analytics feature which is currently disabled for “device type” applications in Application Insights will soon be enabled for these apps.
• Using Analytics, you will be able to do deep analysis over the device telemetry sourced from the HockeySDK. Application Insights SDKs will also continue to be supported for a limited time. We strongly encourage you to switch to the HockeySDK once a compatible version is available. We will be announcing these new versions close to availability dates.
• All other current functionality of the Azure Portal experience outside of Analytics and Continuous Export, including search, drilldown, custom charts, dashboards, etc. will no longer be available. Crash analysis is only available in HockeyApp.
• New functionality added to Analytics in the future – e.g. dashboarding, joining data across mobile and web apps, etc. – should be available for “device type” apps.
• We will soon enable a feature to “link” your “device type” app from Application Insights to HockeyApp. This will be replacing the “Transfer to HockeyApp” function currently provided. Once you “link” the apps there will be an app in HockeyApp that lets you take advantage of HockeyApp capabilities like best-in-class crash reporting and direct user engagement through the feedback feature.
• We have extended the deadline and your existing mobile app will continue to work as it does currently in Application Insights until July 15^th. After July 15^th, only the features mentioned earlier will be enabled for these apps in Application Insights.

We will announce more details in the next couple of weeks. In the meantime, please continue to use your mobile apps in Application Insights; rest assured that now you can get the best of HockeyApp and Application Insights.