Xamarin Platform Reviews

I am using the Xamarin Platform because I am using Visual Studio or Xamarin Studio.

The most valuable feature of the Xamarin Platform is that both the UI are the same in Android and iOS, in one project and Android and iOS, are applications for developing PCL projects. Additionally, the dashboard is good.

The Xamarin.Forms could improve.

I have been using the Xamarin Platform for approximately two years.

Xamarin Platform is stable.

The scalability of the Xamarin Platform is good.

We have four developers using this solution in my organization.

I have not contacted the support from Xamarin Platform.

The initial setup of the Xamarin Platform is easy and takes one day.

Xamarin Platform is a free open-source solution.

This is a good platform.

I rate Xamarin Platform an eight out of ten.

I'm a developer and we are customers of Xamarin. 

We are a 5-member team and Xamarin provides us with a tool kit that crossbreeds from hybrid applications. We write a single line of code that works both with android and iOS. It's a main feature of Xamarin and makes the product very user-friendly. 

The application platform could be improved. We've had some compatibility issues on the android side with the different versions although they work fine with iOS. The product lacks some controls and enhancements that would provide additional features that we need.

The solution is stable. 

The customer support is quite good, they've helped me several times. 

Positive

The initial setup is very straightforward. Implementation takes about an hour. 

This is an open-source solution and there are no costs on the Xamarin side. If you're using it with iOS then you need to purchase a membership which is about USD$100 per year. 

I recommend Xamarin Platform, it's a good solution and I rate it eight out of 10. 

We are using Xamarin for a messaging app and customer-facing end-user experiences. It's been great so far, and thankfully all the upgrades that happened throughout the year have led us to develop good UI.

I think the best part about Xamarin is that you can create apps for both platforms using one source code. That's the most powerful feature. When you develop something for Android, it also builds for iVerse as well. The cross-platform aspect of Xamarin is unique. The ability to develop both apps with a single code base is something very unique.

It would be better if they offered more certifications. They offer a number of certifications for Azure but none for Xamarin. This is something that could be provided for developers to show off their competency. Technical support could be better.

I have been working with Xamarin since 2016. I'm very fortunate to have started working with Xamarin before Microsoft acquired it. I have been using Xamarin ever since.

Xamarin is a well-supported stable solution.

Xamarin is very scalable. You can develop apps for hundreds or thousands of customers with the same code base. That is something very unique. I have a company that has a team of six Xamarin developers. They are all very experienced.

Technical support could be better. We often get support from the community and only sometimes from the Xamarin team. They are not the best, but they are okay.

The initial setup is straightforward. It wasn't earlier, but now it's pretty easy. You can deploy this solution with just a few clicks. Like any other app, if it's an automated deployment, it will probably take an hour or two. 

Xamarin is free. There is no license unless you go for some high-end enterprise features. Other than that, everything's free.

I would tell potential users to look at the new updates coming in over the next three or four months, as those are critical. The best place for you to start with Xamarin is by following the contributors on YouTube. I know there are many paid courses, but they aren't good or worth the money. It's best to take a course directly provided by the content creator or contributor.

On a scale from one to ten, I would give Xamarin an eight.

I used this solution for three years.

I am not using this solution anymore, but I had Visual Studio and Xamarin installed — we were using components of Xamarin.

We were trying to integrate some PSPDFKit functionality. We wanted to open up a PDF document to the last page that the person opened it. If it was a five-page document and they opened it on page two and then when they closed it, they wanted it to open back up to the page where they left off. They were trying to get the PDF to be sticky.

The product owners that were looking at it liked the functionality. There was a competing product library called PSPDFKit. They wanted to get rid of that because it costs a lot of money; however, they wanted the functionality that the PSPDFKit had, inside Xamarin. There were some issues with it that they were trying to resolve.

When they put their ticket in, Microsoft pointed to Xamarin and Xamarin pointed at Microsoft, to say who's going to fix it. That's where it got left off. Xamarin was never able to utilize that module for the PDF. They had to keep the PSPDFKit software, that's the current state. 

The software itself was pretty good. The problem that I faced was that the communication, the roles, and the responsibilities, weren't defined between Microsoft and Xamarin, that's really where the problem was in my opinion. Nobody was taking ownership of that. 

Let's say you have two platforms on-prem. If you're an iPad user, you want the look and feel of the iPad; if you are a Surface Pro user, you want the look and feel of the Surface Pro. What I feel is of the utmost importance in regards to Xamarin, is to make sure that when you do something, whatever the object is, you get the object that the iPad user expects. Conversely, if you're a Surface Pro user, you get the object that the Surface Pro user expects.

I was in favor of it, it had the capabilities. I was impressed by the way they were thinking of moving it forward, scalability-wise.

The developer activity was complex, but it was understandable. From my perspective, I wanted to minimize the number of software vendors we were working with, and consolidate where features were overlapping. The reason I was trying to do that was to try and save the government some money. I was thinking I was still paying X dollars for one contract for three years, and Y dollars for another contract, and the features were all the same — what's the use of paying for both?

I believe the initial implementation took two years. They developed a working product that was in production. Xamarin was included in that initial design.

They had good documentation regarding implementation, but I understand it was evolving and integrating into Visual Studio.

When someone's building something, they want the capability to do so across the platform; initially, there was a goal to build something for iOS, something for Windows, and something for Android. The first thing they dropped was the Android approach. They ended up keeping the iPad and Windows. You write the code once and it generates in both, or in multiple outputs. 

In our situation, we were supporting it on the iPad — 95% of the people used one. A very select few people used Microsoft Surface. It's a tremendous effort to keep both going, although that's the whole purpose of having Xamarin.

It's a great concept. I think it worked well. The concept of doing it is still not perfect. When we generated some code on the iPad, we would get fewer bugs, and with Surface Pro, we would get more bugs.

The same code was pushing a bug on Surface Pro, but not on the iPad. That's basically a fact of maturity over their capabilities. From a business point of view, it didn't make sense for the use case that we had — it was a huge cost for a few users. In many situations, Xamarin has a purpose. There are good reasons to build it once and have it work on both platforms.

Not from a technical point of view, but from the business side, if I was consulting to a large government organization and looking at the cost-effectiveness, I would suggest they have iPads or Surface Pros and give them to their public users — make them decide upfront instead of going down both paths, doubling the paths.

On the market, compared to everyone else, they're the top solution. They're the best solution out there that I could see. On a scale from one to ten, I would give Xamarin Platform a rating of nine. If they become bug-free, I would give them a rating of ten.

I use Xamarin.Forms to develop mobile applications, which basically have the same functionality and cross-platform.

It usually saves time for application development. We write once and the code works everywhere.

In Xamarin.Forms, it is valuable that one and the same code (including UI) work on all platforms. It is very convenient.

They need to take a step towards independence from the UI platform. It takes a lot of time to adapt the native controls.

Everything is fine. There have been difficulties with memory leaks, but usually they are not difficult to fix.

No issues. Everything is fine.

The support is not very good. Bugs remain very long openable.

Earlier, I tried to write code on native technologies, but still liked C# more. 

We switched because it makes cross-platform applications more expedient, faster, and cheaper.

Everything was simple. Besides, on GitHub there are always good examples. Although, you need to understand the native SDK a bit.

Good knowledge

Xamarin is free, or comes with Visual Studio. Therefore, it is very profitable.

I looked at Ionic and other HTML/JS platforms, but I considered this a bad decision. They were too slow and you had more problems with their frameworks than the benefits of their work.

Be sure to look at the lessons from Xamarin University, as well as test projects on GitHub.

We develop Model X for sports and tourism and for Android and iPhone sport.

We have some projects on the sport-level worldwide, not only in Europe. One of our examining apps is the GDPR tool. We want to expand the GDPR tool to mobile apps for local sports and in other non-profit organizations. That's the reason why we want to develop mobile apps in the Xamarin Platform, so we can connect local organizations to sports, tourism, and non-profit organizations. That's our focus.

The Cross Platform is a great asset. We develop and then at the end, we publish other mobile apps to Android and to iPhone platforms. We develop stand-alone apps for Android and the iPhone and then transfer our development to Xamarin because it's much easier.

We need to think about partnering with IBM because there is a need for a big data partner; someone who has machine learning and can help us connect the app to big data.

The stability of this solution is fine.

I have not used tech support too much. In the beginning, we had some issues, but the support resolved the issues quickly.

The initial setup was easy.

Xamarin helped us to develop a cross platform mobile app with less time and resources. 

Managing code is useful using TFS, so a separate code managing software was not required. Authenticating user to app is easy using Azure authentication, which is supported in Xamarin

Provides a wide variety of technical work and some interesting problems to solve. 

Being able to use the .NET framework and platform have me creating applications better than anyone who develops on Windows. 

Being able to use Visual Studio means development gets to use the best IDE currently available.

Xamarin is well-integrated with Visual Studio so it will feel very familiar to you once you start. 

There is limited support for UX widgets. Also, there are compatibility issues between versions of various Xamarin components.

The new go-to-market with Microsoft is different. It will require some adapting.

They are genuine, smart, and action-oriented people across the board!

It saved a lot of time and resources needed to develop a cross platform mobile app.

If you are already heavily invested in the .NET platform and C# development, Xamarin is the quickest way to make native iOS apps.

Their leadership is exceptional at both listening to the customer base and delivering innovative, best-in-class products. A company that takes great care of its people. 

Xamarin has just been bought by Microsoft. What an endorsement!

Our primary use case is to build high performance mobile applications and bring about maximum code sharing between different platforms.

We have a lot of applications, which cater to different types of end users. These have really helped us in creating a connected system, which has enhanced the productivity and usefulness of different products.

• This is close to the native app experience. 
• It brings about good code sharing strategies, which bring down cost and maintenance efforts.

• The android application compilation time needs to be reduced. 
• The deployment package sizes need to be looked into.

We mainly build mobile solutions for enterprises. In most of the cases, it does require a lot of complex domain knowledge and multiple integrations with various internal systems, pretty often legacy ones. 

We decided to work with Xamarin, since it does give us a lot of advantages compared to fully native solutions, which use Java or Swift/Objective-C. First, it allows us to reuse our knowledge of C# and .NET Framework. Next, since .NET and Java are the most common choices for enterprise platforms, it allows us to reuse some parts of business logic without the need to re-write/port them. Then, there is the possibility to apply well-known MVVM patterns to both Android and iOS targeting apps with reuse of up to 70% codebase between platforms, not to mention automated testing possibilities.

Xamarin brought various benefits to our clients. For example, we were able to optimize the service organization for one of our clients. Customers can use now a branded mobile application to submit issues within the customer products. It allows for QR code scanning with error details. It makes it much easier for customers to report issues and for service employees to collect all necessary data, then quickly respond to the customer’s needs.

The possibility to share business domain model-related code between iOS and Android.

It would be great to have some quirks of Xamarin.Forms solved. However, the number of community developed libraries and components are growing rapidly, so this should be another advantage soon. 

Nowadays, it is common to find a problem that you would need to develop from the start since there are no third-party components to reuse.

It does have its drawbacks. From time to time, it is a bit harder to code some specific scenarios compared to the native approach. Since Xamarin is the another layer of abstraction, it also adds its own bugs to the whole process. However, the overall experience is really positive. The benefits listed above are much higher than the costs associated with the overhead needed to work with Xamarin.

We use Xamarin almost exclusively for development of native mobile applications, even when single platform. The development hardware that we use are MacBook Pros with 16GB RAM and min 500GB SSDs. We run Windows 10 in a Boot Camp partition and virtualized using parallels. We have Xcode installed on the iOS partition and Visual Studio 2017 installed on both Windows and Mac partitions, along with Android SDK and NDK.

We use Xamarin.Android and Xamarin.iOS for apps with a complex UI, and use Xamarin.Forms where applicable.

It has significantly reduced the skill barrier for development and testers. Our company is mostly a Microsoft stack house, so most developers either use, or are familiar with, C# and .NET. Removing the need to become proficient in two other languages, makes adoption easier. Though it should be noted that developers still have to become familiar/proficient with the iOS and Android SDKs and the lifecycles of the native apps.

The ability to reuse significant amounts of code between platforms, have a single code repository, and a single development team for all platforms has massive advantages. It significantly reduces development and test costs, and ensures that there is synergy between the platforms on product features and user experience. However, the most important impact is the reduction in product lifecycle costs.

It allows the development of truly native applications in C# using the power of .NET framework and Visual Studio.

Xamarin allows the same development and build environment to be used for all platforms and code to be controlled in a single code repository. Shared logic, such as business logic and models, can be shared between the platforms, which significantly reduces development, test, and maintenance efforts. Typically, this leads to around 75-80% code reuse between the platforms. If Xamarin.Forms can be used, then this reuse typically rises to around 95%.

Xamarin also leverages the full power of the .NET Framework, including things like lambdas, LINQ, properties, bindings, commands, etc. Lastly, it uses the Visual Studio IDE, by far the most powerful and complete IDE available, making development and maintenance much easier.

The Xamarin SDK provides C# bindings to all native iOS and Android SDK APIs, as well as access to the .NET framework and builds to a native package. The Xamarin Mono run time runs a .NET CSR alongside the native run time with a bridge between them, and handles memory management and garbage collection.

App behavior is completely native and performance is near native (depending on the app architecture, but can be even faster than native if the business logic is computationally intensive). App size and memory footprint is slightly larger than native, due to the need for the inclusion of the .NET and Xamarin libraries. In a debug build, this can be significant. However, in release mode, the build process uses a rigorous linking process which removed most of the unused classes and methods from the managed DLLs. As a result, the average app size increases in a release build by only 5 to 6MB.

The most common issues involved are with the IDE and build process. The worst build issue concerns are the caching process MSBuild uses to reduce the build time. It is unnecessarily complex (internally) and will sometimes leave cached files which should have been removed, even when a full solution clean is performed. The work around involves closing the solution and deleting some project folders. Occasionally, IntelliSense loses sync with the code and provides visual error indicators when no error exists.

Xamarin.Forms does have some short comings, especially surrounding performance. Launch time on Android is a particular issue because Xamarin.Forms loads all the external assemblies during initialization. Support for lazy loading or merging of assembles would significantly reduce this, but Microsoft is still committed to a solution. Support of platform specific behavior could also still be improved. However, I believe strongly that Xamarin.Forms is the future of cross-platform native mobile development.

I have been using Xamarin for about seven years, since before it was Xamarin (it used to be MonoTouch and MonoDroid).