While there are many ways of writing mobile applications, for most situations native-hybrid development using Xamarin is a solid choice. It has the advantages of being cross-platform, provides maximum code reuse and maintainability, while at the same time avoiding the disadvantage of being non-performing or non-native that some other cross-platform frameworks have. Apart from these abilities, let us see what makes Xamarin one of the best choices for developing mobile apps.
Below is a list of the reasons that will help you understand why Xamarin is one of best choices for developing mobile apps:
Anyone familiar with C# language and .NET framework can churn out apps targeting Android, iOS, Windows and even Mac desktop applications. This common language is a huge advantage and enabler for developers. Apart from developers, this is helpful even for team leads and managers as it offers better manageability of the overall product development. As this avoids the need for maintenance of multiple elaborate teams for each platform, this results in savings of cost and time.
Xamarin apps work directly on the hardware, rather than on abstractions like webviews, as Phonegap/Ionic apps do. Also, they take advantage of platform-specific hardware acceleration and are also compiled for native performance. All these lead to a great performance on the device, equaling apps written for that platform in a native way.
Xamarin provides several ways to share code across platforms, such as Shared Projects, Portable Class Libraries (PCL) and .Net Standard Libraries. In addition, by using the newer Xamarin.Forms framework, the same code base can be used across platforms much further than before. Resulting in possibility of 30-90% code reusability, depending on the requirements.
A big factor in driving user adoption of a mobile app is the experience provided to the end user. Typically, a platform user expects some things to be in a specific way, for the usage to be intuitive. For example, Android users are used to having back button navigation, or a dropdown control appearing in a particular way, which is different from an iOS user’s expectation. With Xamarin, even if we are using a cross-platform environment, you do not loose anything on the User Experience front, as controls & structure of the screens, navigation follows the guidelines of each platform automatically.
Xamarin commits to making 100% of the APIs provided by Android and iOS platforms available to Xamarin developers, almost as soon as they are available in their native code bases. This means developers do not have any delay in starting to use those APIs once it is released on their native platforms.
Hats off to Microsoft on this front; they provide a top-of-the-line developer experience with their great development environment Visual Studio. The visual studio is integrated very tightly to other tools such as TFS for source code control, continuous Integration and Cloud Testing using Xamarin Test Cloud - which are all a part of what Microsoft calls ‘Visual Studio Team Services’ (VSTS).
As development on both platforms are done by mostly the same development team, features and fixes get ready for both simultaneously. Thereby, avoiding manager's efforts in keeping track of things like what features are in production for each platform.
Xamarin is currently owned by Microsoft, which means it is very well managed and focused, building on Microsoft’s huge experience in developing software solutions. At the same time, Xamarin is based on the Mono framework, which is open source. Xamarin Software Development Kit (SDK) is also open sourced. This gives the developers the option to go as deep as they want, to understand how the platform works.
Connect with Aswin on LinkedIn here, email avarma@vsoftconsulting.com, or learn more about how mobile enablement done right can transform your company here.
Krishna Chaitanya Vedantam is a Senior Software Engineer at V-Soft, working on various mobile technologies like native Android, iOS and Windows Mobile application development, and cross-platform technologies like Xamarin.Forms, Xamarin Native and Ionic. With his knowledge of web technologies well, he is the go-to person for end-to-end development for any kind of mobile application. He has also worked on some cutting edge applications using image recognition and face detection.