Why I Choose Xamarin to Build Cross-Platform Mobile Apps

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Finding this single piece of technology completely shifted and revolutionized my entire life as a developer. I thought what time is better than now to reflect back on my love for this technology that put me where I am today. The IT world is rapidly changing with the recent technologies precisely focusing on mobility. Mobile applications available on smartphones have become vastly more complicated and demanding compared to a decade ago when the applications were still in infancy.

The apps can be debugged straight from the desktop or on devices and emulators. If you plan to develop iOS apps on Windows, it’s also possible as Visual Studio connects to the iOS storyboard designer and iOS simulator. There’s also Visual Studio for Mac which allows for running a simulator on the Mac or directly on a tethered iPhone. Xamarin supports building apps for Apple and Android Watch devices. Engineers can use Visual Studio both for Mac and Windows to build iOS Apple Watch apps.

  • You will want a way of displaying the current count and a button that makes the count increase.
  • Once MAUI is released, Xamarin will be supported for another 12 months.
  • Note that the AXML format is actually an XML format used to describe the user interface on Android.
  • Time to market is essential when you develop a highly competitive commercial app or you’re on a tight deadline.
  • With this handy tool, your quality assurance will become more effortless and fluid.
  • On their own, huge long-lived communities for ‘pure’ iOS and Android naturally outnumber anything even the best of hybrid mobile app frameworks have to show.

So iOS still uses Storyboards, Android uses AXML, and UWP uses XAML. The downside to this approach is that you need to be able to develop those UI’s individually; that requires not only expertise in each of those, but also time. If you are trying https://wizardsdev.com/ to prototype a cross-platform app on a low budget quickly, this can add overhead. However, because Xamarin.Native is just a thin wrapper around the native APIs, anything you can do in the native environment you can do with the Native approach.

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According to Gartner Inc., smartphone sales reached 2.1 billion units by the end of 2019, which has increased the demand for mobile applications that cater to high performance and usability. What started out as a prototyping tool for cross-platform abstractions has grown into what we call Xamarin.Forms today. In addition to the shared .NET code, there is a layer of shared UI that stretches across platforms and renders corresponding native UI. This shared UI layer is an abstraction allowing developers to write .NET code/markup, which gets translated to native UI on each platform at/before runtime. Xamarin.Forms has the huge benefit of .NET developers not having to know the intricacies of building iOS/Android UI by hand. Xamarin allows you to create flawless experiences using platform-specific UI elements.

So you add the library to your project and start using it to do whatever it is you are trying to achieve by calling the library code from your project code. Both share a common code base, either in C# or F#, which means business logic can be shared across platforms. Incidentally, Xamarin.Native is actually cross platform but you have to write your UI code twice – once for each platform.

How does Xamarin help mobile developmen

As a developer that creates a ton of libraries having this core technology at my disposal is absolutely essential and improves my day to day life as a developer. To check for null or getting and setting properties instead of calling a method that greatly enhances my day to day and makes me continue loving this language and platform. At the very core of Xamarin is C# and it’s ability to take advantage of all of the latest features that are being bundled into this awesome programming language.

⊕ One Technology Stack to Code for All Platforms

A nice compliment to Azure DevOps is App Center that provides really simple CI/CD for mobile apps and also essential services such as analytics, crash reporting, and push notifications. Both Azure DevOps and App Center work seemlessly with each other. So, when I learned that Xamarin had full Visual Studio support for Android development built right in to Visual Studio where I could craft my applications with a full designer I was in! I didn’t have to learn a new IDE or a new language at all and I could jump right in. If you ever have written any native Android code in Kotlin or Java, this project will look very familiar.

How does Xamarin help mobile developmen

She can be found at @LuceCarter1 on Twitter, LuceCarter on Github and blogs on her own website. She writes C# in her dayjob, working mainly on an ASP.Net backend but Xamarin is her passion. When not writing apps for fun she can be found speaking around the UK or Europe on her two favourite Microsoft technologies, Xamarin and Cognitive Services.

⊕ Full Hardware Support

It is not hard to see how this variety of .NETs in the ecosystem provides flexibility – developers get to choose which .NET works best for their apps. Xamarin running on Mono is a very important piece of the puzzle for Microsoft – it is what gives .NET the extensive platform reach. With all the .NETs, there are very few devices/platforms that modern .NET developers cannot reach.

Phones and tablets from Apple come preloaded with essential applications, including a full web browser and the Apple App Store. Android devices also come preloaded with similar apps and you can install more using the Google Play Store. I am a huge fan of DevOps as it really simplifies the daily lives of developers. Simply push code to the server and let your DevOps pipeline build, test, and distribute your application to you, your testers, or even the stores.

A lot of the courses are self-paced, so developers can quickly fill the gaps in their expertise with Xamarin on a personal schedule. Defined as the use of code-free programming tools to speed up application development for mobile platforms. Now, with the right project, using Xamarin.Forms can drive the percentage or reused code up to a whopping 95%, providing the ultimate code sharing experience. This skyrockets development speed and drives down costs to a massive degree, making the “write once, use everywhere” mantra a lot closer to the harsh reality.

Thus, Xamarin cross-platform apps look 100% native on any device, providing a better user experience, as compared to generic hybrid apps. This was extremely smart because developers can immediately reuse their existing .NET libraries that they have been building for years and been sharing on NuGet. When I was getting started I was immediately able to re-use my favorite libraries that I had been using since I started C# development such as Json.NET and SQLite-net.

Reusable Codes

It speeds up development by letting you change XAML during debugging and immediately see those changes in the running app, without requiring you to stop and rebuild it. Moreover, your navigation state and data will be maintained, so that you can quickly iterate on your UI. This way, XAML Hot Reload allows for faster rebuilding and deploying your apps to validate UI changes.

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As developers, a lot of you probably think about making an app for your phones. Whether it’s just for a laugh, or to solve an actual problem, our curious minds get us thinking. When a nine year old development framework starts going into a death spiral against modern competitor software, you begin to wonder if it can be pulled back from the brink. Everything is Xamarin is unnecessarily difficult to use – even the text editor is “an abomination”, with developers resorting to using third party tools, such as Rider. To conduct surveys on a global scale and collate information from respondents on tablets, the World Bank used Xamarin for their use-case.

Pro: Quick GUI Prototyping and Next-Level Code-Sharing with Xamarin.Forms

Today, the majority of mobile applications developed are device-agnostic. It has been over 7 years since I started mobile development with Xamarin and I think it is in the absolute best state that it has ever been. I started as a customer building mobile apps for a small startup.

How does Xamarin help mobile developmen

For example, Xamarin.iOS not only includes support for mobile iOS, tvOS, watchOS, and macOS but also allowed developing for Beta iOS 13 months before the official stable release. We appreciate you complementing our post with the details of your mobile course experience with Xamarin. Many of your points, such as time spent debugging, the convenience of using Google/Apple tutorials and observation on low performance are definitely very valuable when it comes to native vs cross-platform discourse.

Con: Limited Community (Compared to Platform-Specific Ones)

From the early days of Xamarin, the goal was to write .NET code that could be shared across mobile platforms, and this is traditionally what is called Xamarin.iOS/Android. Often dubbed Xamarin Native, the goal is to have a shared code layer written in .NET and platform-specific projects for the UI part of the mobile apps. Visual Studio is a Microsoft Integrated Development Environment, or IDE, software used for building, debugging, and publishing applications across all platforms and devices. There are three main Visual Studio Versions for Xamarin – Visual Studio Community, Visual Studio Professional, and Visual Studio Enterprise. The key factors for choosing an acceptable version are the experience of developers and their team size. Programmers can develop software for Web, mobile, server, and desktop with all versions.

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