Xamarin Platform Reviews

I have been doing mobile development using Xamarin Platform for which I have already shared my feedback earlier, and I am focused on utilizing Xamarin Platform for my projects.

Xamarin Platform provides access to native APIs out of the box. If there is something that Xamarin Platform does not offer out of the box, then you could use features like dependency service or effects or custom renderers to tap into and access native features that Xamarin Platform does not provide. For example, if you want to build something related to push notifications that is unique to iOS, Xamarin Platform allows you to build features specific to iOS to handle push notifications and also build features specific to Android. It does provide you the ability to tap into the native features or platform-specific features unique to the platform you want to support, whether it be Android or iOS.

The unique USP of Xamarin Platform is that you can have a single codebase and target all supported platforms, primarily Android and iOS. It saves development cost, and you have a single codebase instead of maintaining two codebases, one for Android and another for iOS. It works on both Android and iOS, so that is the biggest USP, cost-saving, and maintainability.

You can still develop public-facing apps with Xamarin Platform, but there are restrictions on Xamarin Platform App Store and Google Play that prevent you from publishing your apps because they require you to use their latest SDKs and their latest libraries. Xamarin Platform, having been discontinued a couple of years ago, is no longer compatible with the latest libraries and SDKs offered by Google and Apple. So you have to use obsolete libraries and obsolete packages, which means that when you try to publish them, your Google Play or Apple App Store will prevent you from doing that because you have not used the latest libraries.

Right now, Xamarin Platform has been discontinued. Xamarin Platform had its flaws, and there were known issues. Xamarin Platform has a big community of developers, so even though there are known issues and flaws, there are known workarounds. In terms of stability, I would rank it at 7.5, but I believe 7 would be a more accurate rating, so 7 out of 10.

I have been working with Xamarin Platform for more than 10 years.

Xamarin Platform has been decommissioned and succeeded by a new solution, but we have not migrated to that solution in our organization yet.

Scalability applies to solutions that you would deploy, for example, to the cloud, where you have multiple users accessing a service and you want to see how that service handles multiple users simultaneously. Xamarin Platform is more a tool for building apps, and typically only one user accesses the app on his or her device. With a mobile app, more than scalability, you would want to look at the size of the app or its responsiveness and how close it is to the speed that native apps offer. Xamarin Platform Forms apps are generally bigger in size than native apps. For example, an iOS app built using Swift would be at least 30% smaller than a Xamarin Platform app. Xamarin Platform apps, or any cross-platform apps, even Flutter apps, tend to be bigger in size than their native counterparts. In terms of speed, it is near identical to native apps, maybe slightly slower, but imperceptible to the human eye because under the hood, your Xamarin Platform codebase gets translated to native code, so it is as good as native. While you can reduce app size, native apps remain smaller than Xamarin Platform apps.

I have been working on the same tools and services, including Xamarin Platform, and I have not worked with any other technical solutions that would allow me to share feedback with PeerSpot.

Xamarin Platform code-sharing capability has significant savings on app development time and cost, I would estimate it would be close to 50%, maybe. The way it works is if you are using a native stack, you would build one app for iOS and another for Android, expending 2X effort. In Xamarin Platform, you just write one single codebase, so it is less than 50%. Testing still has to be done on each platform once you build the app, and our internal QA team tests our app on both iOS and Android devices, but from a development perspective, it is maybe 50% of the effort that it would have taken had we used a native stack to build for each platform separately.

It is free to use Xamarin Platform as we utilize the community edition. Xamarin Platform was acquired by Microsoft and then made free, which happened way back in 2015, I believe, or 2014. After it was acquired, anyone could build apps and publish them to either Google Play Store or Apple App Store for free. You still have to pay Google Play Store the subscription fees and the fees to Apple for publishing, but building apps in Xamarin Platform does not require any financial investment, as long as you have Visual Studio, which is again free. You have a community edition for Visual Studio and can set up the dev environment on your machine to build apps for any supported platform for free. However, if you are building an app for iOS, you would need a Mac, which is more expensive than a PC, and you would need Xcode and something called Apple Developer Membership, which is around $99 per year for individual developers. Developing in Xamarin Platform is free, but there are other expenses that come into play.

Xamarin Platform is in direct competition with React Native, which is offered by Facebook, and Flutter, which is offered by Google. Facebook, Google, and Microsoft offer competing products for enabling developers to build cross-platform apps, with React Native and Flutter still actively supported. In my organization, as far as I know, we have always used Xamarin Platform, but the industry had solutions such as PhoneGap. PhoneGap was one of the oldest cross-platform hybrid mobile development frameworks, but nobody uses PhoneGap these days.

If you have to build mobile apps using Xamarin Platform, you either build for Android or iOS. There are two ways to build an app. You can develop and have one codebase for, say, Android and another codebase for iOS if you are using a native stack, which is Kotlin for Android and Swift for iOS. This means you need to maintain, as an organization, two teams and two separate codebases. There are certain solutions that enable you to target both platforms with a single codebase, and these are called cross-platform or hybrid mobile development. Xamarin Platform is among these solutions, along with React Native and Flutter, and previously solutions such as PhoneGap and Ionic. Right now it is mostly React Native and Flutter followed by Xamarin Platform. Xamarin Platform was quite popular because it sits well inside the .NET ecosystem. All .NET developers would feel right at home in Xamarin Platform because it uses C# and the .NET ecosystem to build cross-platform apps for iOS and Android. Xamarin Platform has been decommissioned since approximately two years ago and succeeded by something called Maui.NET. Many organizations continue to use it because they have not migrated or are probably in the process of migrating. Our organization has not migrated to Maui.NET, so we still continue to have multiple apps that run on Xamarin Platform Forms. Since it is no longer supported, you cannot use the latest Android and iOS SDKs. It is more suited for in-house, enterprise-use cases than customer-facing use cases because if you are going to build the app, whenever you publish it on Xamarin Platform App Store or Google Play, they ask you to use their latest SDKs and their latest libraries. Given that Xamarin Platform has been discontinued, it is no longer compatible with the latest libraries and SDKs released by Apple and Google. You cannot use Xamarin Platform to release public-facing apps that are downloaded on Xamarin Platform Apple App Store or Google Play Store by customers and users, but they continue to be used in a closed enterprise environment where no such restrictions apply. You can still build on top of and add features to existing apps that were already built using Xamarin Platform Forms and continue to distribute them internally to your corporate organizational users because they do not need to be published to Xamarin Platform App Store or Google Play Store. That is the reason why Xamarin Platform still continues to be popular, especially amongst institutional and enterprise users, still having enterprise usage, but not so much in the external, customer-facing ecosystem.

UI design with Xamarin Platform usually works in any organization where you have UI designers who provide developers with wireframes, usually using software such as Figma. We use Figma in our organization. It is a developer's job to translate those wireframes into apps and app screens using something called XAML, which is like HTML for browsers. Xamarin Platform Forms uses something called XAML to render screens, and that gets converted into the platform-specific UI elements. XAML is an abstraction and then it gets translated into an Android UI element or an iOS UI element depending on where it is being run and deployed. The advantage of Xamarin Platform is that you just write a single codebase using XAML for the UI design, and under the hood, Xamarin Platform translates your code into the native code supported by either Android or iOS.

There are some project templates that you get to choose when you first create a project, such as a tabbed view or a collection view, or an app that has a tab layout or one that has a hamburger menu. Xamarin Platform does not have too many templates. If you look at Flutter, it offers widgets and has an extensive library of widgets, so when you are looking at a wireframe, you would inevitably find a widget that closely matches what you need. In Xamarin Platform, you may have to search and find something that matches your wireframes, but it is unlikely you will find something if the design is unique to your organizational requirements. Most organizations build their own libraries and UI elements on top of Xamarin Platform, and all apps usually have a design language. For example, all our apps in our organization have a common theme, layout, fonts, and colors. We have common UI elements built in Xamarin Platform that we can reuse for new requirements or for enhancing existing features. However, the ecosystem is not as rich as that of Flutter or even React Native. Xamarin Platform did have extensive options but is no longer used, and even the documentation is not supported anymore. If you go to the URL developer.xamarin.com, you would see a warning that states this documentation is no longer supported. Microsoft is encouraging developers to move away from Xamarin Platform and adopt its successor, which is Maui.

Xamarin Platform has been in the industry since around 2013 or 2012, but I do not remember the exact date when it was first released. Xamarin Platform used to be a separate organization before Microsoft's acquisition. My overall rating for Xamarin Platform is 6 out of 10.

I need to use Visual Studio to use Xamarin. Xamarin is the platform, and Visual Studio is the IDE. I use Visual Studio 17.6.2 Community Edition for Mac.

The organization I'm working for is a retail company. We have hundreds and hundreds of stores across multiple countries and regions in the Middle East and Asia. The app I develop, build, and enhance is used by about 30,000 to 40,000 store employees across all these stores. It's a store management app that has a huge amount of functionality built into it. It can do inventory management, store receiving, and customer management. We built the app using Xamarin.Forms.

We not only have external people who use our app, but we also have in-house house people, especially store employees, who use the app, and that's where the MDM solution, Microsoft Intune, comes into play. Microsoft Intune is more for distributing the app internally to our store employees. It's a device management kind of thing. The apps automatically get upgraded without users being required to update the app. Intune does a whole lot of other things, like match policies or devices.

Xamarin.Forms reduced the effort and time to build and market our solution, market our features, and get our solution into production. We have Android and iOS. When using Xamarin.Android and Xamarin.iOS, we have to write the same solution two times, one for each platform. But with Xamarin, if we write the solution once, it will run on both platforms. We can reuse as much as 90% to 95% of the code, which, in our case, was written in Xamarin.Forms to be used across both Android and iOS. The other 5% we wrote needed to be tailored for the specific platform. Suppose we want to create some niche or some specific features that are not available in Xamarin.Forms would be the 5% we need to write for each platform. Xamarin.Forms help reduce the effort required to build across platforms and solutions and time to market.

One of the major benefits of Xamarin.Forms are that you can write once and run anywhere. A valuable feature is that you write UI using XAML, something like HTML, except that XAML is Microsoft technology, which helps you write and build mobile interfaces. XAML is a mature technology. The good part of Xamarin is that if you use it to build something cross-platform but find that that's not available out of the box, you can extend Xamarin using many features, like dependency services and custom vendors. You could use those to tailor your solution for a specific platform. For example, suppose you want a feature to be implemented in Android and iOS differently than in a standard implementation. In that case, many features are available in Xamarin to facilitate that. A simple example would be that if you want a page to look different on Android and iOS, Xamarin can easily do that.

There are issues with Xamarin, such as when you run into errors doing something called linking. When you build your solution, you can use Linker, which can give you errors if you don't link properly. However, the major I see with Xamarin right now is that there is no visual editor. For example, Android Studio or Xcode have visual editors where you can drag and drop controls. If you are designing a mobile screen with an image, some text, and a button, you could just drag controls from the library into the screen and see how they look. But there is no feature in Xamarin, and you have to write code.

I've been working with Xamarin Platform for the last seven years.

I rate Xamarin's stability an eight out of ten.

Customer support takes time. They're not very responsive.

Neutral

The initial setup for App Center was easy. I rate it a seven out of ten. AppCenter is primitive. Some solutions, like Azure with the DevOps pipeline, have much more functionality. However, App Center does the job for us. Once you release it to production, you can configure App Center to build your solution and release it to stores like the App Store and Google Play.

Setting up the developer environment could take about half a day because you must set up the IDE, Microsoft Visual Studio. For Android, you have to get all the SDKs. Xamarin also cannot work without Xcode, the development IDE for iOS, so you must also set that up. Xamarin works on .NET Framework, which you download as part of the IDE installation.

We just required one person for the deployment since it's automated. Once we triggered the deployment, App Center took care of that. We need teams of Xamarin developers to build, enhance, and maintain the app. One person is not enough to maintain the app, but that depends on the scale and complexity of the app.

You can build in Xamarin without paying any money. What costs money is the IDE, Visual Studio, Professional, or Enterprise edition. What would cost you money if you're building apps for the Apple Store is the Apple developer fee, which is $99 per year. If you release the app to the Play Store, you have to pay $25. But Xamarin's license is free.

Other solutions like React Native and Flutter also help you write code once and then run it on multiple platforms like Android and iOS. They do that without requiring you to write the same solution for each platform, which involves duplication or complication of effort.

Xamarin comes in various flavors. At the technical level, we use something called Xamarin.Forms, which is the most popular flavor of Xamarin. You also have some older flavors like Xamarin.Android and Xamarin.iOS. Those are specifically targeted for native app development, whereas Xamarin.Forms are more for cross-platform app development, where you can write code once, and it will run on all supported platforms like Android and iOS.

However, Xamarin will be "decommissioned," though that's probably not the right word because Microsoft has introduced something called MAUI as a successor to Xamarin.Forms. Microsoft acquired Xamarin, built on top of it, and introduced many features after they acquired Xamarin. Xamarin has some flaws, but since it's been there for eight to nine years, there are known workarounds for existing issues found through the developer community. On the contrary, MAUI is a new product full of bugs because it was introduced very early. It's an extremely buggy solution introduced by Microsoft, which is why, if you do some research, you will discover that there are currently no enterprise solutions that use MAUI. Microsoft is then going to lose its limited foothold. Even though MAUI was introduced more than a year ago, there has been no large-scale adoption by any enterprise. Microsoft is kind of forcing all these companies to move from Xamarin to MAUI, but none of them are willing to do that because it's such a poor product, including my organization. However, the first two or three iterations of Microsoft's products were full of bugs before they radically overhauled their solutions. MAUI is useful for small hobby projects or individual developers who want to play around with mobile development. Many of these organizations will now move to other solutions like React Native, an open-source solution from Facebook, or Flutter from Google. Likewise, they might choose native solutions like Android Studio with Kotlin or iOS with Xcode.

Xamarin has a very limited market share in the mobile development space. There are hardly any job openings for Xamarin. On some sites, there would be fewer than 50 job openings for Xamarin. By contrast, with React Native, you would find the number of openings for it to be much more than Xamarin. The same goes even if you search for something like iOS or Android. This suggests that Xamarin is used by a very small percentage of enterprise clients.

We use App Center when deploying the solution, and it automates deployment. Likewise, If you want to update the version of the app on the Apple Store or Google Play, you just have to trigger a build on App Center, and then it takes care of building and deploying the app to the App Store or Google Play.

I rate Xamarin a five out of five. The way I see it right now is that there are three big players in the market for cross-platform development. We have Flutter offered by Google, React Native offered by Facebook, and Xamarin offered by Microsoft. If React Native would be eight in popularity and adoption, Xamarin would be maybe five point five or five out of ten. Flutter is a relatively new technology, but it's picking up very rapidly. It has already surpassed Xamarin or will surpass it very soon. Xamarin will retire in a year or so, and MAUI is in bad shape. I expect Flutter and React Native to be the two most popular technologies for cross-platform mobile development.

Primarily, I use it to develop mobile applications for both Android and iOS.

Microsoft has since released .NET MAUI (Multi-platform App UI), which offers some significant improvements over Xamarin.Forms.

One of the key improvements is the streamlined architecture. Previously, with Xamarin.Forms, you had multiple projects within a solution. .NET MAUI simplifies this with a single-project architecture, which saves development time.

Additionally, in Xamarin.Forms, you sometimes had to write platform-specific code for Android or iOS to meet certain client requirements. .NET MAUI largely eliminates this need by consolidating everything into that single project. It also supports the latest .NET versions (six, seven, eight), offering better performance and access to newer features. Overall, .NET MAUI seems to have addressed these potential areas for improvement within the Xamarin framework.

I like its simplicity. As someone who didn't start my career as a dedicated developer, I was used to building websites or Windows applications. 

Transitioning to mobile app development meant learning new languages like Swift or Java. With C# and Xamarin, though, I could leverage my existing skillset. Xamarin, and specifically Xamarin.Forms, let me write my code once and deploy it natively to both Android and iOS.

Xamarin.Forms are very useful. Essentially, it's a framework that allows me to create the UI mostly in XAML. This XAML code is then translated into the native UI elements for each respective platform.

The advantage is that roughly 90% of my UI code can be shared. This significantly reduces the amount of platform-specific UI work compared to having to write separate UIs for each platform.

For the most part, Xamarin's integration with Visual Studio improved the workflow, whether I'm on Windows or Mac. Since I'm familiar with Visual Studio, it provides a comfortable development environment.

Additionally, features like Hot Reload and the integration of tools like Copilot help streamline the development process. Overall, it offers a positive development experience.

In Xamarin.Forms, we have the option to preview our UI designs, but the functionality can be limited. So, this is not fully functional. Since I have some knowledge of iOS, where when you write code or design in the storyboard, your design is immediately visible in the preview. 

So, if this feature could be improved in Xamarin, it would be great for developers. They could see what they are designing right in the preview rather than having to run and check it on the simulator or the device. It would save developers a lot of time.

I have been using it for five to six years now. 

It is a stable product. 

Xamarin scales well. It's a Microsoft product, so there's a lot of ongoing development and optimization. Plus, with a robust developer community, there's plenty of support.

There are more than 500 users using this solution in my company. 

I always received the help I needed in a relatively timely manner.

Positive

The initial setup is relatively easy. Obviously, we need to follow the guidelines for the App Store and Play Store when publishing, and we might need to set up some local testing environments. 

However, the core Xamarin deployment process isn't overly complex. These days, we have great CI/CD tools to automate much of that.

There is a license, maybe. 

If you're new to Xamarin, I'd recommend starting with a solid foundation in C#. Microsoft provides extensive documentation on Xamarin, and there are many helpful tutorials on YouTube. Focus on building small sample applications to get the hang of it. Even I started that way!

Overall, I would rate the solution an eight out of ten. Because when there are some problems when I have to create some APKs or APIs, it's a large size. Also, I had to deduct some marks for its performance. So, a little bit as compared to React Native applications or any native applications, it is quite slow.

We use the Xamarin Platform since we have a .NET team that is familiar with .NET, and we appreciate the idea of shared code between platforms. We still use MVVM architecture, so we have loads of shared code in view models and services, which are all shared between our apps.

The native features and Xamarin Essentials package are highly valuable to us. However, we struggle with support for third-party libraries in .NET MAUI, particularly with Firebase, including messaging, analytics, and Crashlytics. This has led us to create our own custom bindings. The concept of shared code between platforms remains valuable, enabling us to maintain a good architecture.

The primary area for improvement is the support for third-party libraries, especially for major providers like Microsoft and Google. The lack of robust documentation and support for third-party bindings is a significant hurdle. There was a transition from Xamarin Forms to .NET MAUI, which led to a loss of available libraries. Better documentation would greatly help developers to create their own bindings.

I have been using Xamarin Platform since its beginning for over ten years.

The stability of Xamarin Platform is rated as a five out of ten. The challenges with stability arise mostly when using Visual Studio Code, where debugging can be inconsistent, with issues often depending on the day.

The architecture allows us to scale the app effectively in terms of scalability. 

However, integrating third-party libraries presents challenges since they require us to create our own bindings often. I rate the scalability at a five out of ten.

The general documentation is good, however, when I face issues, there is no direct way to reach out to Microsoft's support for assistance. Queries posted in forums often don't receive responses.

Neutral

The setup process has become more complex with changes, like the move from Visual Studio for Mac to Visual Studio Code with plugins. Most team members find it challenging to build both Xamarin Forms and MAUI concurrently.

Xamarin Platform is free, and we use an Azure subscription at a relatively low cost for our builds. It offers a good value for money, although it requires time to make it work effectively.

We considered React Native, and during a full redesign, we might opt for a different platform. Aviva, a previous employer, chose React Native over transitioning Xamarin Forms to .NET MAUI.

While I recommend Xamarin Platform, I suggest checking the library support needed for first-party libraries to avoid future challenges. 

I rate the overall solution a six out of ten.

It's just giving me that flexibility to save the resources right including hiring a different native developer so they can hire the Xamarin personnel who can handle both iOS and Android applications. It will save time, cost, and money. That's the main vision and why our company is using the Xamarin technology application. It's a common UI for both iOS and Android.

The product has a lot of features. 

The common UI is great. You can just write one XM channel core and it'll be used for both iOS and Android. That is a strong feature. 

It's just natively compiled on the device like other platforms. It can work across platform technology and is natively compiled to build onto both platforms. You can access the native features through the custom vendor, which we call Dependency Services. Dependency Service is another vital feature to access the native functionality of the different platforms, including iOS and Android. 

It's not too difficult to set up.

They should focus on the Xamarin compiling item. It's hard to find what the exact issue is on the Xamarin core. They have to focus more on the Xamarin compiling features and tools and maybe test some options.

We'd like to have some chat support functionality. It would be helpful if we got responses faster. 

They have to focus more on UI debugging. It may suddenly crash without a known reason. They have to focus more on the performance or debugging things and, or course, publish more packages to support both iOS and Android.

I have been working on this platform since 2015. I would say it's been almost seven years.

It is stable, however, we expect more rappers so that we don't need to write a lot of code to get the native features. They should make available a lot of the frameworks so that it is easy to understand. We've also had to do some debugging.

I've found the Android version scalable. In general, I'd say you can expand it. 

We're using it in the IT department, and I have been working with this company since 2015, and it's used all over.

In our department, we have maybe five or six people who work mostly on the Xamarin side.

We tend to get a quick reply. Sometimes we have to wait for a couple of business days. I'd be happy if they gave us some kind of chat system so that I could quickly get a response instead of waiting on an email from the Microsoft team.

It's not difficult to set up Xamarin. It'll come with the visual studio directly and you can click it. Even for the beginner to install Xamarin, it's pretty straightforward.

The deployment for both iOS and Android is good. Sometimes with Android, it is taking time. iOS is faster. For example, iOS is a couple of seconds, maybe 10 or 15 seconds. Android has a lot of dependencies. Therefore, compared to iOS, Android is slow; however, generally, it'll deploy within 15 to 20 seconds or maybe 25 seconds sometimes.

We took the Visual Studio licensing. If you take that license, this product comes with it. 

It might be $400 or $500 per year. We are using the Enterprise version of the software. They might pay per year or per developer. I'm not sure of the exact rate.

I tend to work with the most up-to-date version. 

We are using the Azure cloud to deploy the application. Our CHD is configured on the Azure pipeline.

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten. I've worked with it for a long time and like the product in general. 

We use the product to build Android, iOS, and Windows mobile applications.

The most valuable feature of Xamarin is its testing capabilities. Testing saves both time and cost in mobile application development. The process is costly and time-consuming when developing separate platform-specific applications for Android and iOS. However, Xamarin offers cross-platform functionality, allowing developers to write code once and deploy it across multiple platforms.

Regarding improvements, there are still some limitations with Xamarin, particularly regarding access to core functionality in Android and iOS. When developers need to utilize certain core features of these platforms, they encounter difficulties accessing them directly within the Xamarin project. Instead, they must create and implement interfaces in platform-specific code to access.

We have been using Xamarin Platform for a year.

In my company, only two developers, including myself, are currently using Xamarin.

The initial setup process was straightforward. We downloaded the Xamarin installer and proceeded with the installation.

The product is inexpensive.

The platform is easy to learn as many tutorials are available on YouTube. Additionally, many Microsoft MVPs offer demos and resources that simplify the learning process.

When deciding on a mobile application development framework, it's essential to consider your specific requirements. Evaluate the pros and cons of each available option, including alternatives. The choice ultimately depends on how well the technology aligns with your project needs and your comfort level with learning and adapting to new tools.

I rate it a 9 out of 10.

We have so many applications on Xamarin Platform. We can use Xamarin native Developer, Xamarin.Android or Xamarin.iOS. It is a true native solution, and we can use the cross-platform framework using Xamarin.Forms. There are a lot of times when we have to code or complete beginning steps with the Ionic Framework. We can target the core native platform like Android, iOS, and Mac.

It is great that Microsoft supports many libraries for digital forms and Xamarin. The Xamarin community is big. They respond, and so many developers share their knowledge on the framework, core custom control and details on implementation.

This solution has improved in so many areas, like in .NET MAUI. They have reduced the structure and introduced so many new features. However, Xamarin Platform lacks in app size. When we are developing an app, it is higher compared to other frameworks. The developers are working on the issue, as many people have raised concerns about the app file size. They should introduce a fix on .NET 7.0.

We have been using this solution for about six and a half years. It is deployed on public cloud.

Xamarin Platform was stable initially, but they recently launched MAUI, and there are bugs. This is because it is an initial release of their global release. However, they are working on the bugs and hoping to introduce fixes in .NET 7.0.

It's a scalable product for the enterprise level, and we can use Xamarin Platform because it gives us a native look and feel. We have about three or four projects using Xamarin.Forms, so about ten people use the solution. They are primarily developers.

We've never used technical support because we immediately use GitHub if we find any problems or bugs. They have developers that are responsive to those issues, and if there are any workaround solutions, they work on them. I rate the technical support a nine out of ten.

The setup is very easy, and we can do the setup on Visual Studio. While installing Visual Studio, the modules are similar to the ones on cross-platform. A developer can select a particular model, and it will install everything. After that, we only have to set up the Visual Studio tools.

There is no license, and it is open-sourced. Therefore, there are no hidden fees.

I rate this solution a nine out of ten. I rate it a nine because it is a great framework tool for them to develop mobile apps within .NET., and only minimal XAML knowledge is required. If they don't have the XAML knowledge, the developer can design within C#. In addition, the community in Xamarin Platform is big, and many developers and program managers from Microsoft Azure. They inform of tips and tricks whenever new information is available about Xamarin on YouTube, Twitter, or websites. As a result, all developers contribute to design challenges.

We have so many developer teams for many frameworks and languages. Xamarin Platform is suitable for the developer who knows the C#, .NET framework and is familiar with XAML. They can easily do mobile app development in Xamarin.Forms.

Regarding additional features, they have already introduced MAUI .NET 6.0, and they are upgrading these Xamarin.Forms to MAUI. I think they are supporting Xamarin.Forms next year, and after that, all the applications will move to .NET MAUI. I believe they have already introduced many features in .NET MAUI and are working on other features to introduce in .NET 7.0 and .NET 8.0. Every quarter, the .NET products release new features and fix bugs.

The strongest use case for this solution is developing cross-platform mobile apps. Most people are building both Android and iOS, and Xamarin lets you reduce your development efforts and build it from a single code base. You can build for Windows and Mac from it also, but most people are using it to build mobile apps.

Xamarin.Forms is a framework that's coupled with the Xamarin platform, and I think one of the biggest productivity gains is that you can build a single UI using Xamarin.Forms and it runs on both platforms. Plus, it gives you the ability to use C-Sharp, which is a very mature, robust language. The combination of forms for cross-platform UI and C-Sharp for the programming language are my two favorite features.

The solution struggles a little bit with binding libraries. If you want to use something like Google Maps or a third-party component that's been built for Android or iOS but isn't part of the actual Android or iOS platform, you have to build these things called binding libraries. It's a tedious process and the tooling doesn't do a lot to help you with it. The really common libraries usually have bindings already built that you can use, but if you get stuck having to build binding libraries, it's a lot of work.

I'm a Mac user and I'm not a huge fan of the Visual Studio for Mac because it's not as strong of a tool as the Visual Studio for Windows, and you don't have the same features on both. That's why I have to resort to a different IDE. I generally work in JetBrains Rider because it's a much better IDE for Mac. The IDE support on Mac lags, but they do have a new version of Visual Studio out, so I can't say I've given it a fair chance yet.

I have been using this solution for about ten years.

I think the stability is slightly stronger when building iOS apps. When you build an iOS app, there's nothing that is really restrictive, so you should be able to achieve the same type of performance, look, feel, and quality of using Swift and all the native iOS stuff.

The Android apps run pretty well, too. I noticed a little bit of a performance hit on the Android side, but that's because there's some pretty complicated architecture stuff. Overall, I would say you can build very high quality apps with the solution.

The scalability is more based on your backend than Xamarin itself, but there are no real restrictions. You can add developers to the team and there's no restrictions with Xamarin that you wouldn't encounter with any other mobile development platform.

I'm a contractor, and my last customer had five developers using the solution. 
I heard about one mobile team in Denver at Charter Communications that had 25 people on it, but that's a lot. I would say most teams and companies that I've worked with have between two and six developers using the solution.

This is a Microsoft product and you go through the same channels for tech support that you do for any other Microsoft products. I would say they're pretty good at getting back to us. Parts of Xamarin are maintained by an open source team, so that's always a challenge as to what responses you sometimes get from them. 

I would say they're as good as any other solution on support. I almost always find solutions on Stack Overflow before I hear back from them, because there's a pretty big community there. I did a lot of work at Cinemark and we had two to three million users a month and I've never run into anything that we weren't able to solve pretty quickly, within a day or so.

On a scale of one to five, with one being bad and five being excellent, I would rate their technical support team as a four.

Positive

The setup is moderately complex. In general, I don't think development for a nice mobile is very simple, but I wouldn't say that it's super complex. .Net itself is a pretty productive programming language, so it helps you with a lot of things, but there's definitely a learning curve to get up to speed on it.

It takes a day to get the solution configured on your workstation, if you know what you're doing. The reason I say that is because you have to install the Android SDK, the iOS SDK, and then you have to install Xamarin on top of all that. All of them have to be installed and configured correctly for everything to work, so there's a lot of dependencies. I think it probably takes at least a day to get a workstation set up and configured, and then you're off and running. 

In regards to DevOps and all that, in most places I've worked, you have developers with their individual machines configured. Then when you merge your code into a git repository, the builds are automatically done and either sift to the testing team or are uploaded to the app stores, depending on where you are in the project. That might take a week or so to get going, but just as an individual developer, it takes about a day.

There's no licensing cost for Xamarin. Like the rest of .Net, it's open source, but there is a licensing cost if you want to use the IDE. There's a number of different development environments you can use. 

You can use just traditional Visual Studio. I license Visual Studio Professional. It's about a thousand dollars a year and Xamarin comes with it. 

I also license another IDE, which I could run independently. That one is called JetBrains Rider, and it's only about $200 a year. You could do all of your Xamarin development with that if you didn't care to license the other stuff. 

The actual platform itself technically doesn't require anything. If you wanted to download Visual Studio Code, which is a free IDE, and figure out all the plugins to get everything to build and work the way you wanted, you could actually technically develop for free, but I don't think many people do that.

I would tell people considering this solution that there's a lot of training available. There's a lot of documentation on Microsoft's website and apps for getting started. Places like Pluralsight also have a lot of video training. I would recommend downloading the IDE and going through some of the Microsoft tutorials initially, and then jumping into Pluralsight to find some deeper training.

I would rate this solution pretty high. I would give it a nine out of ten. I've never had the Xamarin platform cause a project to fail. In other words, I've been successful in every project where we've tried to apply it and, except for external problems with the requirements or things like that, I've never run into any technical problem that I couldn't solve with Xamarin. The apps that you can produce can be very professional depending on how much time you put in and you can dramatically reduce the amount of code you have to write to support two platforms.

We use the solution for inventory management in our warehouse and also for unbound deliveries.

The solution is easy to understand and has banking integrated. The shorter development time, the bugging and as well as availability of a lot of documentation on the web. Also the native integration is easy.

The monitoring of the remote devices is not good as it should be extended along. It would be useful if the log is more integrated with the central console. I am not sure it can be accessed but it would be better.

I have been using the solution for six to seven months.

It is a stable solution.

It is a scalable solution. There are four to five users using the solution. Some are in the US, some in Europe and some in Spain.

We have not used the technical support as there is a lot of information on the web.

The initial setup was easy. We used the MDM for the deployment as it can be deployed to remote devices. The deployment took two days but the problem was after that for fixing and backing. The maintenance becomes difficult because there is a problem with the log. If there would be a better log that would be transmitted to a central console would be better because we have to get the log from the remote device and analyse what happened

I think the solution is free.

I recommend other users to use it, like the native integration or native development or native features. We use the SAP so they have to consider which kind of integration they should adapt to with SAP. I rate the overall solution a nine out of ten.

Xamarin Platform is used for base unit testing and the creation of new projects. 

The solution lets us apply the application tools for automation IDs, so we can test our unique testing. We can check step by step the automation ID by the codes or controls and all the functionality based. 

Xamarin Platform enables you to use a single code language. This is beneficial for Android, iOS, and Windows platforms, so they can be developed over application or built over application. 

You can create applications like MarketWatch, trading, business development, commerce, gaming, and also e-commerce applications using Xamarin.Forms.

With Xamarin Platform, you can use business levels of the applications such as billing, counter billing, barcode scanner, and payment gateway applications.

Xamarin Platform is missing the code renderer, like a model view controller where you can design your code and then pass it while in preview model. Having this would provide better performance.

I have been using Xamarin Platform for five years. 

Version 5 is the most stable version. The latest version has some bugs in the test version.

The initial setup of Xamarin Platform is easy. Once you have created and initialized your project in Visual Studio, you can create the Xamarin.Forms platform project.

The instructions are step-by-step and easy to follow.

Deployment is completed in minutes. You can find the rest of your devices and run and click on your virtual devices within minutes.

Xamarin Platform is open-source, so it is free to use.

I have evaluated Syncfusion. Most of the community users, including software engineers, use Syncfusion. The Syncfusion controls provide battery efficient controls, like the panel control and some entry controls. For some of these, you can customize your entry using the custom renderer. Syncfusion provides a free account for the community version.

I would recommend that anyone that is considering implementing Xamarin into their organization first learn all about the product. You can learn directly via Microsoft videos. After, you can learn about the languages Xamarin uses. 

Once you have developed your applications by yourself, and you have learned about the fundamental of Xamarin.Forms, then you can start the practicalities of a test project. Then you can start your project, but it takes some time to learn.

Overall, I would rate Xamarin Platform a nine out of ten.