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

Not very: it fundamentally assumes you're making a game, so it draws 3D scenes and uses a continuous update loop, which taxes the battery on mobile devices. The UI tools are also just finicky enough to make non-game app development a pain.

In addition, it does have a little size overhead - the smallest possible build on iOS (a blank screen) is 12 MB with all the optimizations on, and double that if you need to invoke System functions or libraries that need them.

We launched an online training program called Xamarin University, and so we have a fair amount of data on how long it takes people to get to the point where they are proficient enough to write a production app. As you might expect it's highly varied. But the median is about 45 days to pass our certification.

Hey there, I am James Montemagno a developer evangelist at Xamarin. I have been developing native apps with Xamarin for nearly 4 years now across iOS, Android, and of course Windows (I was a customer for 2 years before joining Xamarin). I just wanted to clarify a bit about Xamarin and Xamarin.Forms. It is important to know that Xamarin.Forms is a cross platform UI layer that sits on top of the core Xamarin platform. Using native Xamarin you are still sharing your backend C#/.NET code and then building out native user interfaces for each platform.

The Xamarin.Forms library adds an abstraction over common controls available on iOS, Android, and Windows Phone. Xamarin.Forms is extremely extensible, but it is not for every app, especially if you need a lot of custom UI or API access. For data entry, proofs-of-concept, or other simple apps it is great and we have a guide to help you select: http://cdn1.xamarin.com/Architecture%20Selector.pdf. The nice thing here is that either approach can use a shared-code backend.

I think I can address some of your concerns below:

1.) I would love to know which components you were having issues with and I can work with the team. There are a lot of settings in Visual Studio and Xamarin Studio as far as when to break on exceptions so I would love to help out here.

2.) If you are exclusive to using Xamarin.Forms then yes you will have a limited set of controls, since Xamarin.Forms is a subset of common controls. It is extensible via “CustomRenderers”, but that require some work and if you need a lot of them then it might be worth looking into the native approach without Xamarin.Forms as this approach will automatically give you access to every control on each platform you are creating.

3.) We are always looking to expand our documentation across all of our products and highly recommend checking out our updated developer portal: http://developer.xamarin.com there is a plethora of Xamarin.Forms related documentation as well as http://developer.xamarin.com/guides/cross-platform/xamarin-f... It is pretty extensive, but if there is something missing please please please let us know and we will work with the documentation team to add it. In addition to this documentation we do have a book that has been written by Charles Petzold on Xamarin.Forms that is freely available: http://developer.xamarin.com/guides/cross-platform/xamarin-f...

4.) For XAML intellisense it is built right into Xamarin Studio, for Visual Studio there is an extension that you can install: http://www.cazzulino.com/mobileessentials.html This will be integrated automatically in the future. I apologize that this is tricky to find.

Hopefully this helps out a bit with some of the issues that you have run into, but again please please feel free to email me with any questions, encounter any problems please reach out to us so we know and can fix them. You have my direct line: james@xamarin.com.

Xamarin and Qt are very different.

Xamarin provides a managed runtime environment (Mono) and a way to call native iOS and Android APIs from that environment. Xamarin Forms builds on top of those things to provide a cross-platform UI toolkit that uses the native controls on each platform.

Qt is a cross-platform GUI toolkit that draws its own controls using each platform's low-level graphics facilities. As such, the controls in a Qt-based application aren't fully native to each platform. Qt tries to mimic the native controls, but the emulation isn't completely faithful. A particular problem is accessibility for users with disabilities, e.g. blind users who need to use a screen reader. Last time I checked (several months ago), Qt didn't implement the accessibility APIs for iOS or Android at all.

Because of the non-native nature of Qt, I would strongly recommend avoiding it in favor of something like Xamarin or RubyMotion.

About PhoneGap:

> 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)

Can you elaborate on what you mean here?

Sure, the apps never feel completely native but you can still invoke native features including the back button on Android, reuse the same code to make a web app and while bugs happen it isn't any worse than trying to create a cross-browser web app (which is essentially what you're writing).

Pretty much every software development choice is a trade off and PhoneGap is a good one sometimes.