Xamarin Platform Reviews

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!

Let’s take an example of a simple restaurant App which needs to be developed for each platform (iOS, Android, Mac, and Windows). Xamarin gives you the power to produce a quick proof of concept where you can use Xamarin.Forms and have your app ready within some days for each platform, using only one Xamarin developer. Otherwise, you need different native developers to have your app developed for each Platform. 

I have been using Xamarin Platform for four years and learning new things each day. Being just an Asp.NET C# developer, I feel more confident because, for me, developing apps for iOS and Android is a dream came true, without migrating to Objective-C or Java.

Also, it’s cost-effective when you don’t require more native developers for each platform. You can train one C# developer for Xamarin using free resources or even provide paid training, and he or she alone can deliver your apps for each platform.

Test Cloud, Calabash, SpecFlow, and Xamarin.UITest are the features which can’t be ignored because just writing code doesn’t mean your app will run flawlessly. You need to test your app on each possible device and configuration, which you can do easily.

And how can I forget plugins like MvvmCross, which make a developer’s life easy.

I would say that every technology has room for improvement, Xamarin Platform is no exception. All Xamarin library issues which need to be taken care of should be top priority. Sometimes it becomes clumsy when there are a lot of things going on in your project or solution and you need to take care of business logic in parallel. On top of everything, providing only wrapper classes does not make a developer’s life easy.

So yes, there are improvements going on and they will need to continue to improve in the future as well.

As far as my experience with Xamarin, I’ve found no issues with the stability, if you have the right people working with you. It’s always easy to criticize a technology and it amazes me to see people out there criticizing some technology just because they couldn’t use it properly.

Over time it has created a revolutionary change in the technology and market. In our case, we were able to deliver projects on time and that’s what matters in the end. Maybe we have faced some issues but it would not be nice to say that Xamarin is not a stable technology. As a matter of fact, it is very stable, and they're working on making it more and more stable each day.

People are flying radio-controlled drones and aircraft as a hobby with the help of apps which were developed using Xamarin technology. Yes, there is room for increasing the scale a little bit further with the designer in the Visual Studio, more specifically, Xamarin.Android Designer in Visual Studio.

I would rate technical support at eight out of 10. There are communities like Xamarin Forums and Stack Overflow that will possibly give you answers. If you are a developer you know exactly what I am talking about.

In the very beginning, it was a bit complex because I was using Visual Studio 2015 which doesn’t come with a Xamarin module like Visual Studio 2017; you need to add it manually.

If you plan smartly enough I think you will save some bucks for sure. You don’t need different native developers for each platform as Xamarin comes with cross-platform development so that’s an advantage.

I would rate Xamarin Platform an eight out of 10 because, while developing applications using Xamarin Platform you will come across some library issues which need to be taken care of first. But I would strongly recommend Xamarin Platform because it’s a reliable technology compared with what is out there in the market and a plus-point is support for C# language. 

My only advice is that you please do a proof of concept before diving straight into development. It is always good to see beyond what you want and the requirements of your project. First, do some benchmarking of the requirements and then go for implementation of your solution.

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.

In most cases, I develop apps for iOS and Android, but there are some rare cases that include UWP platform. My environment includes a Windows 10 PC with VS 2017 and a Mac mini with VS for Mac.

All of our mobile developers can easily substitute for each other on different projects and platforms.

• One language for all platforms: C#
• XAML for UI in Xamarin.Forms
• Provides 100 percent coverage of APIs on each platform

I would like to see hot reload, similar to what Flutter has out-of-the-box. There is "Live Reload" but it’s still in preview and was only recently announced.

There have been some stability issues, mostly with VS 2017 for Windows when working with iOS.

No issues with scalability.

Community support is great. You can always ask on the Xamarin forum or Stack Overflow. If you are a member of Xamarin.University you can get a one-to-one hour with a technical instructor.

Xamarin is my first cross-platform framework.

Using early versions of Xamarin, especially VS on Windows for developing iOS, were a mess. But now, with the latest installer, it is really straightforward.

In most cases, it is sufficient to have free/community license. But if you plan to seriously develop production-level, highly polished apps, you need to use Xamarin.Profiler and the professional or enterprise license.

I rate it a 10 out of 10. It's the best cross-platform framework, and it continuously improves.

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.

• The ability to work in macOS for Xamarin iOS solutions
• Cross-platform support

Creating mobile apps became quicker as we started to use the code base function.

Xamarin Studio should be more polished and support native functions (iOS, Android). It should be working like a charm.

I have used this solution for three years.

Generally, when iOS products get updates, some issues can happen with Xamarin. Crashes happen from time to time.

Most scalability is handled on the server side. In rare cases, some libraries weren’t supported, such as the TCP/IP stack.

Technical support is good.

Setup was actually pretty complex, as we had to get experience. We had some oddly written solutions provided from previous vendors of our customers. These were impossible to maintain.

By the third year, we got a solid ROI. It’s hard to measure, but is was probably over 200%.

Licensing and pricing have changed, as the product moved to Microsoft. Before that, it was fairly complex: $800 per developer place, for one platform only.

We did look at alternatives. However, other solutions were only hybrid platforms, which lagged behing when doing moderately complex projects.

You will need to invest a bit of time to become a good vendor using this framework.

I use Xamarin.Forms to develop mobile applications, which basically have the same functionality and cross-platform.

It usually saves time for application development. We write once and the code works everywhere.

In Xamarin.Forms, it is valuable that one and the same code (including UI) work on all platforms. It is very convenient.

They need to take a step towards independence from the UI platform. It takes a lot of time to adapt the native controls.

Everything is fine. There have been difficulties with memory leaks, but usually they are not difficult to fix.

No issues. Everything is fine.

The support is not very good. Bugs remain very long openable.

Earlier, I tried to write code on native technologies, but still liked C# more. 

We switched because it makes cross-platform applications more expedient, faster, and cheaper.

Everything was simple. Besides, on GitHub there are always good examples. Although, you need to understand the native SDK a bit.

Good knowledge

Xamarin is free, or comes with Visual Studio. Therefore, it is very profitable.

I looked at Ionic and other HTML/JS platforms, but I considered this a bad decision. They were too slow and you had more problems with their frameworks than the benefits of their work.

Be sure to look at the lessons from Xamarin University, as well as test projects on GitHub.

Mobile applications for our music streaming service. 

• A much larger portion of shared codebase
• Better usage of software patterns
• Better knowledge sharing among team members
• More streamlined, standardized development and testing processes.

• Cross-platform development saves time and provides consistencies. 
• C#: Simply the language. 
• Native UI: No compromises needed for final users. 
• MVVM: Clear concerns separation. 

The performance needs improvement, especially the dev tools, and also the ultimate output of the mobile applications.

Five years ago, we switched from native development to a cross-platform solution, we have never regretted this move.