Xamarin Platform Reviews

From a developer's point of view, with the help of Xamarin, we can focus on the functionality, rather than spending time coding differently for iOS and Android.

For me, Xamarin becomes more valuable when it comes to forms. Xamarin has come up with a lot of features over time. I love XAML most. Recently, Xamarin has added a lot of features such as Effects, Behaviors, Triggers, etc. This has made the UI user-friendly, lively, and attractive.

I feel that the Android AppCompat library creates a lot of issues. A lot of development time is often wasted solving these issues.

When I started with Xamarin, I used to face a lot of stability issues. Its memory management was very poor. But now, I don’t face any kind of issue related to stability.

Scalability depends on how one designs his architecture.

Initially, our team used the technical support and it was good. But now, you can find most solutions on blogs, Stack Overflow, etc.

I was into Web development using .NET and C#. I wanted to try mobile applications and, with my knowledge of C#, that is what pulled me towards Xamarin.

Initial setup is straightforward. Microsoft has combined Visual Studio and Xamarin Studio so you just need to download the installer and follows the instructions. That’s it.

For personal use, the Community Edition is free. If someone is a freelancer he can easily use the free edition.

I have been using this solution for the past three years. I have developed many iOS and Android apps using Xamarin classic as well as Xamarin.Forms. In a nutshell, I would say that for those who love C# and mobile, this platform is a blessing.

I would like to rate this solution as a seven out of 10. The reason for this rating is that this solution is definitely better than others. We can share a lot of code among the different platforms and can also use our C# skills, which we love. In addition, we can get native UI, native API access, and native performance. Still, there are a lot of areas in which Microsoft can make it better. And I must say, they are working on it.

Architecture is the key point of every successful project and this is applicable to Xamarin as well. When implementing any project, one needs to be sure the app is following all the design patterns like MVVM, dependency injection, etc.

The main reason for use is productivity, time gain, and code reuse.

The company that I work for develops white label applications. Xamarin makes it easy to create white label applications for all platforms.

Easy to develop applications for all platforms, including Mac and Windows.

Needs to improve the customization of its screens.

Xamarin provides two ways to build great native apps: Xamarin Native and Xamarin.Forms. We used Xamarin.Forms on many of our solution platforms, but it also can be used on complicated scenarios (with a lot of business logic code), like product configurator apps.

Xamarin.Forms exposes a complete cross-platform UI toolkit for .NET developers. In our case, we used existing C#/.NET knowledge to build native iOS and Android. The advantage is that a single team can target multiple platforms (Android, iOS, and Windows) on a shared C# codebase.

A very good feature of this solution is Xamarin.Forms, which is best for specific types of mobile apps. Based on my experience (and also Microsoft's recommendation), the best scenario for use would be for:

• Data entry apps.
• Apps requiring very little platform-specific functionality.
• Apps where code sharing is more important than custom UI.

For those who use only XAML to design the UI, it would be better if there was a better XAML previewer or designer.

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.

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.

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.

• 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.

UI Test - Xamarin Calabash framework with c# front end, Testing support on both Local (No execution hours limitation) and Testcloud (limited hours based on subscription)

Xamarin.UI is an automation library, through which you can automate any android and iOS application, without any concern of the language used to create that application. You can test any native (created on native language for example, for android java and for iOS object c) and hybrid application ( created on C#) with Xamarin.UI test.

Easy set up Automation framework with Specflow (BDD Approach) and NUnit. Same code works for both android and iOS (If locators are same). Even though if locators different we can use the same code with different locators (Using conditions). It helped to automate iOs and android apps for our client within show time which helped them for regression testing (daily basis) so manual effort reduced.