Ask HN: Are you using .NET to write cross-platform desktop or mobile apps?

Microsoft's .NET is an open-source platform for building desktop apps and mobile apps (and more) using C#, F# and Visual Basic. Does this sound too good to be true?

For example, Electron is often discussed on HN (liked and disliked), but .NET is far less discussed as a cross-platform option.

Similarly, Xamarin is a platform built on top of .NET for building Android and iOS apps (using one codebase). This sounds like the holy grail of mobile development. But what is the reality?

I did a search on HN and found no stories about Xamarin from the last year. The top search results are HN stories from 5-10 years ago. This makes me wonder how popular .NET is for cross-platform desktop or mobile apps.

What has been your experience using .NET writing cross-platform desktop and mobile apps?

You might want to consider how much Microsoft uses it in their own products before choosing to use it. This article describes the situation pretty well:

"not even Microsoft, literally the people who own Xamarin, use it in any of their big products like Teams, Outlook, and the list goes on. Instead, they reach for native development or Electron. So we can just tie a bow in it and have a minute's silence for another end-of-life cross-platform software development framework."

"None of These Problems Are Solved With MAUI. The poor developer experience, how apps look, XAML being a pain, and these other core issues won’t be resolved by MAUI. So, if you already know Xamarin Forms, and you’re waiting for MAUI to land, but you’re not 100% thrilled with the experience so far, then it’s a great opportunity to think about learning something else."

Source: https://betterprogramming.pub/xamarin-forms-is-dying-and-mau...

I love C#.NET + Xamarin + Visual Studio.

  * Easy to get started
  * Builds for iOS on a remote Mac but runs in local emulator
  * Performant!
  * Simple to write device specific code
  * Power of .NET
  * Supports more than Android and iOS, like desktop UWP

Xamarin is now called MAUI. You'll find better search results using the MAUI term.

We built Rec Room (https://recroom.com/) using Unity across several platforms:

* iOS

* Android

* PC

* PlayStation

* Xbox

* VR

Rec Room is a "game for building games". I'd say Unity has worked pretty well. Given that the product is a game this success with single-lang cross platform may be more common than other industries. Still, though, I'm surprised that there isn't a similar "engine" for non-game cross platform development like Unity or Unreal that folks are generally happy with.

(Shameless plug, we are hiring if folks are interested https://recroom.com/careers)