Azure Mobile App obsolete?

Question

We are currently running Azure Mobile App backend + Xamarin app as client and it works fine. Soon, we will be creating new mobile backend.

However, it would seem that, according to this https://github.com/Azure/azure-mobile-apps-net-server/issues/227

azure mobile apps is abandoned? Even Adrian Hall has moved to AWS? This begs the question, should I create mobile backend using WebApi 2 and deploy it as usual Azure Web App, use Azure Web App Mobile App?

Namechanging from Azure Mobile Service to Azure mobile app was confusing enough,there is also complete lack of up to date documentation for Azure mobile app SDK except from couple of examples.

Answer 1

I'm a PM in App Center team at Microsoft. I'd like to share our continued commitment to Azure Mobile Apps as our team own it. We are doing user research right now to understand the evolving needs for these services and plan to build the next generation of Azure Mobile Apps as part of Visual Studio App Center.

While we're working on the roadmap, we are fully committed to supporting Azure Mobile Apps including support for the latest OS releases, bug fixes, and documentation updates.

This is a similar pattern to what we are doing with HockeyApp and Xamarin Test Cloud. App Center is the next generation for those services and as we roll their functionality into App Center, we are re-imagining key developer workflows and adding new features, as well as integrating them into an end-to-end CI/CD solution that helps developers ship better apps faster.

Answer 2

I arrived here while looking for guidance on Xamarin.Forms offline sync feature in Azure Mobile Services.

Turns out Azure Mobile Services has been superseded by Azure App Service Mobile Apps. Fine, I'll look there for offline.

Turns out Azure App Service Mobile Apps has been superseded by Visual Studio App Centre. This supports auth, data and push so I went looking for offline again.

Turns out App Center Mobile backend as a service (MBaaS) offering is being discontinued so MS can focus on DevOps.

So in short if you want mobile backend service don't bother looking for MS to provide you a stable platform as a service, instead focus on building your own on their core products and hope they don't abandon those after a couple of years.

I hope these notes help sign-post the changes and demystify things a litte.