11–20 of 168 posts
Ruby Motion vs React Native vs Xamarin vs Native (Java/Swift) is a question I have all the time. All look interesting and worth learning
If you want to develop cross platform mobile apps your only other option seems to be React Native. I'd like to see a good rundown of the pros and cons of each approach.
There also is Delphi with the mobile Addon. https://www.embarcadero.com/products/delphi
Xamarin is nothing more than a C# wrapper around the native iOS and Android APIs. Everything you're familiar with (UIViewController, UIView, UITextField, UIButton, etc) remains the same. The main benefit (other than using C#) is that all non-UI code can be shared across platforms (iOS, Android, Windows, server, etc).
Xamarin.Forms is built on top of Xamarin and lets you reuse the same code for UI as well (using their own abstraction that's similar to WPF/UWP). I would only recommend this for relatively simple apps as you lose some control over platform specific details.
I'm currently developing an app integrates Google APIs like SignIn and a google product that i plan to make available on all major platforms (Android,iOS,Windows). In the beginning, i thought about making a hybrid app, because it could save me time on the long run, but starting to developing with Cordova and EmberJS or even Xamarin was frustrating. My major reason for frustration is the tooling, cordova emulator just…
Xamarin is Microsoft now.
MS stack developer I think yes, MS invests a lot into the Xamarin platform, so I expect it to become more stable and more developer friendly than it was before. I have a plenty of experience doing cross platform mobile development and I tried several other alternatives, Xamarin was actually the best - easy to start, easy to implement stuff, fast enough on mobiles, has a lot of components, etc. Also I would like to re…
The downside to this is that making a UI seems to even out your gained time--it's extremely messy and even complicated. Code that's valid in C# produces vague underwater bugs in Java code, which makes you keep hacking around until you find a working solution.
Not to mention the docs: some parts of the documentation are completely outdated to the point of not even compiling on an older version of Xamarin. For example, the tutorials on using Google Maps in your Xamarin.Droid application are way out of date, ignoring the fact that the "Google Play Services" component has split off into thirty-or-so components. Some of the most used API's are not documented at all, simply having a "To be added" description.
All in all I find much potential in Xamarin, and I really want to love it, but it's a messy nightmare to use, and it only makes me want to use Java and Swift separately for apps.
However, in my experience, both Xamarin Studio and the build system are buggy as hell. Random or inexplicable build errors, things that break during updates, incompatibilities with official Android support libraries... I find myself doing 'clean project and rebuild' to fix random errors, or switching between alpha, beta and 'stable' channels all the time depending on which one does not have the bugs that I'm running in to.
Xamarin.Forms is simply a disaster. Because it aims to unify the apis for the UIs for various platforms it boils down to only the most common denominator of those platforms. And then makes it worse. Not only is it buggy, it is also very slow and incredibly limited. In our office we're keeping a list of all of Xamarin's silliness we encounter, here is just one of those:
"Clicking a Button changes its text alignment from center to left-aligned; it requires writing a custom Renderer to solve this."
I'd love to hear from someone using Visual Studio if their experience is more positive, but my advise is: please stay away from Xamarin.Forms and Xamarin Studio as much as possible.
One thing I love is that because it maps so closely to native Android development, you don't need to look specifically for Xamarin.Android tutorials/SO Answers/blog posts etc to learn how to do something.
Most of the time, information targeted towards native Android development will apply to Xamarin.Android also, and you can basically map example Java code to C# because they use the same classes/namespaces.
I'm going to be getting into Xamarin.IOS soon, hopefully the experience is as nice.
I must say that, having its own quirks and nuisances (specially in Xamarin Studio, which was pretty buggy until version 6.x), it does the job pretty well.
In fact, when we wrote our iOS and Android clients, Xamarin was still pretty immature. But if we had to rewrite them today, it would be one our of first options, right after using the native frameworks (which ensures the best results, but drastically increases the costs).