Some thoughts after (almost) a year of real Xamarin use

I work in enterprise world, as such, my mobile development experience is mostly on side projects, across all the three major platforms.

Did a project at work with Cordova, it works, but it is only usable for CRUD type of applications.

As for hobby projects, a few multimedia ones with SDL, which was ok since nothing more was being used besides OpenGL and touch input.

Tried to use Qt/C++, only to discover it kind of works, but even with all these years of talking about mobile support, Qt is pretty raw. Lots of native API wrapping is required or only available in the commercial version.

Xamarin is quite appealing, and even with the usual HN complaints about their prices, they are actually not much different from other commercial solutions for the mobile market.

Personally, I am using C++ for portable logic, together with the native UIs in Java, C#, C++/CX. However due to the pain it is to use the NDK, specially now that Google dropped the ball, I am thinking about focusing on just one platform.

If I would be doing this at work, maybe Xamarin would be the solution to go.

My experience with Xamarin:

I've been working for half a year with Xamarin Forms. I Think using Xamarin is the way to go, there is no need to re-code something for 3 different platforms when you can just have a shared codebase. Tools like Cordova and Phonegap don't work. They produce a very crappy experience that doesn't use the native OS functions, doesn't look and feel native, feels slow and has many bugs (for example they can't use the hardware back button).

So Xamarin can create real native apps, which is a HUGE advantage over Cordova/Phonegap/others, but there are also serious downsides:

1) It's BUGGY. Many components have bugs, and the code often behaves in very very weird ways (I had exceptions not being caught by catch blocks for example), many debugger functions don't work properly with mono (like locals) and very, very often exceptions are thrown without ANY indication what caused them or where they occurred exactly.

2) You a limited in the features you can use because it's a wrapper (as mentioned in OPs post).

3) Documentation sucks and is very limited. It's getting better (mostly because of StackOverflow), but it's still not sufficient.

4) It has XAML which is very nice combined with MVVM, but the XAML implementation sucks. It doesn't have intellisense and it's just generally very awkward.

I don't think the 'big cost' is a valid argument against Xamarin. If you can develop 1 app for $40k where you would normally have to develop 2 or 3 apps for $30k each, that's a BIG win and Xamarin's costs are negligible.

We tried mostly anything (and not only tried; we used for production work because clients wanted us to) and, outside native, Xamarin really is the best thing we worked with so far. For it's downsides, the upsides are too good to not take advantage off. Some cons I recognize but the case everyone keeps mentioning that you get into issue when you really want to do complex native platform stuff with animations etc I haven't encountered. Nor is integrating SDK's an issue. It's just something you plan in your project; it's a one-off. We integrated very large SDKs for hardware products and the hardware vendors, when something goes wrong, always blame the wrapper and it has 0 times been the wrapper; most of the times a bug or undocumented feature by the SDK creator. The wrapper is so thin and the mapping is so clear that it's actually never an issue.

Do you think the commercial version of Qt would have covered what you needed? I would also be interested I'd anyone else here is in a position to compare Xamarin and Qt. It's very hard to compare the two from the outside. Thanks.

Hi there, I'm the CEO of Xamarin. I'm really sorry to hear that you had issues with consuming third-party libraries. This is actually something we've been recently very focused on improving.

First of all, in December we released a new tool called Objective Sharpie that can automatically bind Objective-C libraries into C#:

http://forums.xamarin.com/categories/ObjectiveSharpie

If you're skilled enough to build the Objective-C library, then you'll be able to use Objective Sharpie to create a C# binding. We also have docs on doing this for Java on developer.xamarin.com.

Some of our customers don't have the time or skill to do this themselves, and so we've recently created a bindings team that wraps third-party native libraries for our customers. Many of these end up published on http://components.xamarin.com/ (there are over 300 components now). But some of them we can't immediately publish because we need to get permission from the original library author to redistribute their library. This is especially true for commercial SDKs. But if you contact us directly, we might be able to give you something.

We also do custom bindings through our support team. This is something that unfortunately we haven't made very obvious. But you can just email support@xamarin.com and we can create a binding for you.

Like I said, this is an area we're pretty focused on. If you have any feedback, please feel free to let me know directly: nat@xamarin.com.