Why we chose to implement Bring your own Identity Management Provider with App Center Auth
App Center Auth, Data and Push services are Microsoft’s mobile backend services for developers. We shipped App Center Auth in early preview on May 7, 2019, and have been co-designing new features with our users since then to build an identity management solution that we hope you’ll love.
Three months and many user interviews later, we’ve incorporated the feedback we’ve received and added many new capabilities such as exposing the JSON web token, supporting React Native and improving the user experience in Auth.
Today, I want to share an early preview of some of the upcoming features and dig further into how your feedback helped us enable developers to bring their existing identity management providers with App Center Auth.
Enabling developers to bring their own identity management provider
It has been a fun and insightful journey to validate our hypotheses and iterate on new functionality for App Center Auth with our customers. Here are some of the key insights we have learned from our developments about identity management:
- Developers have a strong relationship to their existing identity management provider, and they are unlikely to change their identity solution once their application is released. Most developers had an existing identity management solution, and it would be an extra cost to migrate it to Azure AD B2C just to use App Center Auth.
- Developers preferred to stick with solutions that they were familiar with, and 90% of App Center developers would rather use a cloud provider that they are already familiar with.
- 75% of App Center developers were using an identity management provider that was not Azure Active Directory B2C.
- Auth0 and Firebase Authentication are the top two identity management providers used by developers.
Based on what we learned above, it was clear that we needed a way for developers to easily configure their existing identity management solution with App Center Auth, while still allowing developers to reap the benefits of using the signed-in user’s identity across App Center in services like Data and Push.
To address this feedback, we started work this month to connect your Auth0 tenant or Firebase project with App Center Auth! As a preview, here are some of our initial designs:
Collaborate with us
Increasingly, we’re adopting a new model of transparency by integrating with other non-Microsoft products, and open-sourcing our plans, specs, designs to co-create our product with developers to build a product more aligned to your needs. Stay tuned for more details in the next three months when we launch this feature and share information on how to get started. In the meantime, you can follow this GitHub issue for updates on enabling developers to bring their own identity management providers with App Center Auth. Feel free to leave us feedback in the App Center repo; we’re always keen to hear what you’d like to see in App Center Auth!
