Amazon launches AWS Mobile Hub for testing, running, and monitoring iOS and Android apps

Amazon Web Services (AWS) today announced the introduction of the AWS Mobile Hub, a service for building, testing, deploying, and then monitoring iOS and Android apps. The tool is live now in beta, and it’s free in the sense that you only pay for the services that the Mobile Hub uses, including AWS compute and storage services.

Today’s news, announced at the AWS re:Invent conference in Las Vegas, builds on the set of mobile-focused announcements at last year’s re:Invent. But this is a full-fledged mobile backend as a service (MBaaS), not just bespoke mobile analytics, push notifications, identity management, and data synchronization.

“The AWS Mobile Hub helps you at each stage of development: configuring, building, testing, and usage monitoring,” AWS chief evangelist Jeff Barr wrote in a blog post on the new feature. “The console is feature-oriented; instead of picking individual services you select higher-level features comprised of combinations of one or more services, SDKs, and client code. What once took a day to properly choose and configure can now be done in 10 minutes or so.”

This service abstracts away the underlying compute and storage that mobile apps need to use, and that’s increasingly the trend at AWS, which announced the Lambda event-driven service last year and Amazon IoT earlier today.

Microsoft Azure has the App Service for building mobile apps. Startups like Kinvey, KidoZen, and Kony offer dedicated MBaaS services. All three can run on AWS.
Find all our coverage of AWS re:Invent here.