Xamarin Platform Reviews

We develop Model X for sports and tourism and for Android and iPhone sport.

We have some projects on the sport-level worldwide, not only in Europe. One of our examining apps is the GDPR tool. We want to expand the GDPR tool to mobile apps for local sports and in other non-profit organizations. That's the reason why we want to develop mobile apps in the Xamarin Platform, so we can connect local organizations to sports, tourism, and non-profit organizations. That's our focus.

The Cross Platform is a great asset. We develop and then at the end, we publish other mobile apps to Android and to iPhone platforms. We develop stand-alone apps for Android and the iPhone and then transfer our development to Xamarin because it's much easier.

We need to think about partnering with IBM because there is a need for a big data partner; someone who has machine learning and can help us connect the app to big data.

The stability of this solution is fine.

I have not used tech support too much. In the beginning, we had some issues, but the support resolved the issues quickly.

The initial setup was easy.

Xamarin helped us to develop a cross platform mobile app with less time and resources. 

Managing code is useful using TFS, so a separate code managing software was not required. Authenticating user to app is easy using Azure authentication, which is supported in Xamarin

Provides a wide variety of technical work and some interesting problems to solve. 

Being able to use the .NET framework and platform have me creating applications better than anyone who develops on Windows. 

Being able to use Visual Studio means development gets to use the best IDE currently available.

Xamarin is well-integrated with Visual Studio so it will feel very familiar to you once you start. 

There is limited support for UX widgets. Also, there are compatibility issues between versions of various Xamarin components.

The new go-to-market with Microsoft is different. It will require some adapting.

They are genuine, smart, and action-oriented people across the board!

It saved a lot of time and resources needed to develop a cross platform mobile app.

If you are already heavily invested in the .NET platform and C# development, Xamarin is the quickest way to make native iOS apps.

Their leadership is exceptional at both listening to the customer base and delivering innovative, best-in-class products. A company that takes great care of its people. 

Xamarin has just been bought by Microsoft. What an endorsement!

Our primary use case is to build high performance mobile applications and bring about maximum code sharing between different platforms.

We have a lot of applications, which cater to different types of end users. These have really helped us in creating a connected system, which has enhanced the productivity and usefulness of different products.

• This is close to the native app experience. 
• It brings about good code sharing strategies, which bring down cost and maintenance efforts.

• The android application compilation time needs to be reduced. 
• The deployment package sizes need to be looked into.

We mainly build mobile solutions for enterprises. In most of the cases, it does require a lot of complex domain knowledge and multiple integrations with various internal systems, pretty often legacy ones. 

We decided to work with Xamarin, since it does give us a lot of advantages compared to fully native solutions, which use Java or Swift/Objective-C. First, it allows us to reuse our knowledge of C# and .NET Framework. Next, since .NET and Java are the most common choices for enterprise platforms, it allows us to reuse some parts of business logic without the need to re-write/port them. Then, there is the possibility to apply well-known MVVM patterns to both Android and iOS targeting apps with reuse of up to 70% codebase between platforms, not to mention automated testing possibilities.

Xamarin brought various benefits to our clients. For example, we were able to optimize the service organization for one of our clients. Customers can use now a branded mobile application to submit issues within the customer products. It allows for QR code scanning with error details. It makes it much easier for customers to report issues and for service employees to collect all necessary data, then quickly respond to the customer’s needs.

The possibility to share business domain model-related code between iOS and Android.

It would be great to have some quirks of Xamarin.Forms solved. However, the number of community developed libraries and components are growing rapidly, so this should be another advantage soon. 

Nowadays, it is common to find a problem that you would need to develop from the start since there are no third-party components to reuse.

It does have its drawbacks. From time to time, it is a bit harder to code some specific scenarios compared to the native approach. Since Xamarin is the another layer of abstraction, it also adds its own bugs to the whole process. However, the overall experience is really positive. The benefits listed above are much higher than the costs associated with the overhead needed to work with Xamarin.

We use Xamarin almost exclusively for development of native mobile applications, even when single platform. The development hardware that we use are MacBook Pros with 16GB RAM and min 500GB SSDs. We run Windows 10 in a Boot Camp partition and virtualized using parallels. We have Xcode installed on the iOS partition and Visual Studio 2017 installed on both Windows and Mac partitions, along with Android SDK and NDK.

We use Xamarin.Android and Xamarin.iOS for apps with a complex UI, and use Xamarin.Forms where applicable.

It has significantly reduced the skill barrier for development and testers. Our company is mostly a Microsoft stack house, so most developers either use, or are familiar with, C# and .NET. Removing the need to become proficient in two other languages, makes adoption easier. Though it should be noted that developers still have to become familiar/proficient with the iOS and Android SDKs and the lifecycles of the native apps.

The ability to reuse significant amounts of code between platforms, have a single code repository, and a single development team for all platforms has massive advantages. It significantly reduces development and test costs, and ensures that there is synergy between the platforms on product features and user experience. However, the most important impact is the reduction in product lifecycle costs.

It allows the development of truly native applications in C# using the power of .NET framework and Visual Studio.

Xamarin allows the same development and build environment to be used for all platforms and code to be controlled in a single code repository. Shared logic, such as business logic and models, can be shared between the platforms, which significantly reduces development, test, and maintenance efforts. Typically, this leads to around 75-80% code reuse between the platforms. If Xamarin.Forms can be used, then this reuse typically rises to around 95%.

Xamarin also leverages the full power of the .NET Framework, including things like lambdas, LINQ, properties, bindings, commands, etc. Lastly, it uses the Visual Studio IDE, by far the most powerful and complete IDE available, making development and maintenance much easier.

The Xamarin SDK provides C# bindings to all native iOS and Android SDK APIs, as well as access to the .NET framework and builds to a native package. The Xamarin Mono run time runs a .NET CSR alongside the native run time with a bridge between them, and handles memory management and garbage collection.

App behavior is completely native and performance is near native (depending on the app architecture, but can be even faster than native if the business logic is computationally intensive). App size and memory footprint is slightly larger than native, due to the need for the inclusion of the .NET and Xamarin libraries. In a debug build, this can be significant. However, in release mode, the build process uses a rigorous linking process which removed most of the unused classes and methods from the managed DLLs. As a result, the average app size increases in a release build by only 5 to 6MB.

The most common issues involved are with the IDE and build process. The worst build issue concerns are the caching process MSBuild uses to reduce the build time. It is unnecessarily complex (internally) and will sometimes leave cached files which should have been removed, even when a full solution clean is performed. The work around involves closing the solution and deleting some project folders. Occasionally, IntelliSense loses sync with the code and provides visual error indicators when no error exists.

Xamarin.Forms does have some short comings, especially surrounding performance. Launch time on Android is a particular issue because Xamarin.Forms loads all the external assemblies during initialization. Support for lazy loading or merging of assembles would significantly reduce this, but Microsoft is still committed to a solution. Support of platform specific behavior could also still be improved. However, I believe strongly that Xamarin.Forms is the future of cross-platform native mobile development.

I have been using Xamarin for about seven years, since before it was Xamarin (it used to be MonoTouch and MonoDroid).

We use this framework when the requirements for mobile application development include different platforms.

I like Renderers in Xamarin. They allow us to use native-platform controls easily.

They need to improve performance, especially for the Android platform. Also, some controls are missing in the Xamarin framework when compared to native controls; for example, the checkbox control.

The primary use case at Seamgen for the Xamarin platform is to create forms or data-driven apps that utilize mostly stock UI components and benefit greatly by sharing a common core software layer for data processing and handling.

With the help of Xamarin.Forms, we can effectively realize a cross-platform app with a very small team of 1-2 developers, targeting both iOS and Android platforms.

In a purely native development environment, you would typically find a developer specializing in one of the major platforms. If the objective is to create a mobile experience for more than one platform at the same time, you typically need distinct resources for each platform. Often times they create the same code/logic in different programming languages for each platform. In this scenario, the Xamarin platform can reduce overhead significantly through code-share and reuse. The typical team size for a Xamarin project is significantly reduced compared to purely native projects.

The ability to share a platform-agnostic common core, or business logic, enables a mobile developer to write code for all targeted mobile platforms, independent of the individual developer's specialization in iOS, Android, or Windows. This helps not only during development but also enables easier maintenance of deployed apps, since bug fixes or feature additions can be often made in the platform-agnostic layer.

Xamarin's profiling tools are only available for the highest tier of MSDN subscription and compatibility with platform-native profiling tools is rather lacking. This causes friction when working on performance-related issues.

While working with the Xamarin framework at Seamgen, we do not encounter any major stability issues in the framework itself. However, we do recommend testing any third-party component for fitness, because it is fairly easy to incur stability issues by importing external components or libraries.

Outside of the general issues that come with bigger development teams, the Xamarin framework added no extra overhead.

Before Microsoft acquired Xamarin, the technical support was excellent. The acquisition added some noticeable friction and the transformation period for long-running Xamarin customers to the Microsoft environment wasn't the smoothest.

At Seamgen, we evaluate which framework and platform are the most viable to achieve our client's goals on a per-project basis. We do not default to any one set of tools for everything. We work on many projects where Xamarin is not suitable.

The initial setup is very well documented and there are plenty of resources available to hit the ground running if you are an experienced developer already. For beginners, the entire setup can be overwhelming because it involves setting up development environments for iOS, Android, and Windows at the same time if you want to target all three.

Xamarin is available under several licensing arrangements. Each developer needs one license at least. To access all features, especially the Profiler, you need the highest tier.

We do evaluate other options like PhoneGap, Itanium, React Native, Cordova and the like, not only against the technical requirements of each project but also against the particular requests of our clients.

Compared to alternative cross-platform development frameworks for mobile (i.e. Appcelerator, Cordova, Ionic, React Native, etc.) we consider Xamarin the most viable option in most cases.

We have been using Xamarin for over four years on multiple app projects of varying sizes, complexity, and code-reuse, ranging from fully featured custom UI social networking applications to data-driven forms apps with a maximum degree of codeshare and minimal UI.

Xamarin can sure look like the one hammer that makes every project look like a nail, but it is not. Here at Seamgen, we consider it another tool in our toolbox, suitable to successfully realize our customer's ideas.

We have been using Xamarin for enterprise mobile application development. Primarily, we are targeting iPhone devices. This field mobility application helps end users to perform their duties and view 360 information about the work to be performed.

• Because of the C# programming language, we can train our .NET developers to learn Xamarin and develop mobile apps easily. 
• It helps us to easily integrate and implement Azure Cloud API services. 
• We can track mobile usage with the help of the mobile device center.

We very much like the XAML design techniques, multiple layout and pages, MVVMCross support, and portability across different platforms.

• It needs offline sync capabilities to store data on devices persistently. 
• Security features and data analytics need to be improved.

This is a free product, so there is zero investment on licenses and IDE.

This product is very easy to design and develop, and it is using C#. Microsoft is supporting this application, so product reliability increases.