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Xamarin is indeed the closest there is to the holy grail of cross-mobile development. I too had some success with it for a small project at first, but just like
by dougk16 7y ago
Xamarin is indeed the closest there is to the holy grail of cross-mobile development. I too had some success with it for a small project at first, but just like the theme of the blog post, the challenge is in the long-term maintenance being cost-effective, not just the initial development. Especially in the face of these adversarial platforms constantly changing things underfoot. For example in Android recently I've been forced to switch to the AndroidX library, and iOS has Dark Mode coming out. Will Xamarin support both of those platform changes cleanly? Maybe, but it's a risk.
I'd be happy to hear if the project you worked on has been cost-effective to maintain in the long term. Then at least someone has seen the mountain top!
- jbverschoor 7y agoI’m pretty happy with nativescript. It suppers typescript, different ui libs (angular, vue, and no-lib) You can directly access native apis within your js/ts code. And they provide good cross platform defaults for widgets.
- merb 7y agothere is a difference between Xamarin and Xamarin.Forms, one thing is just C# => ObjC binding / C# => Java binding (C# to AOT native shared libraries and binds it into the native things), which basically SUPPORTS ALL of the native features. so basically you can either have one application on top of a custom ui framework (xamarin.forms) or you can only share business logic, and write controllers, which feels native in c# or the native language. i.e. without forms you can build a controller with objc or you can have the implementation in c#, and call into a shared business logic library. unfortunatly the docs are really really weak when you consider what you really can do with xamarin. with forms you can build a ui that works on both platforms so basically you have 100% shared code.