Xamarin Platform Reviews

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.

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.

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.

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.

We are using the new release of Xamarin Platform (as .NET MAUI) to create hybrid applications, so we don't need to implement them individually in different platforms. We can simply deploy in a single codeless application which is automatically deployed to multiple platforms. This is the biggest reason why we chose Xamarin Platform to begin with, and the second major reason is that it is produced by Microsoft. Being a Microsoft product lets us do large, sophisticated things with it, and we currently have around 2,000 developers using it in my company. 

Generally, we use a mix of .NET MAUI, Xamarin.Forms version 5.5, and ADO.NET with Visual Studio to deploy mobile applications on Android and iOS through the Google Play Store and Apple Store, respectively, and we also have a CI/CD pipeline using App Center.

With Xamarin Platform we are able to create hybrid applications that run cross-platform on Android and iOS, removing the headache of building and deploying separate applications for each platform.

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.

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 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.