Should you choose Xamarin Forms for your iPhone and Android application development rather than any of the other options such as Flutter and React Native? Yes is the short answer. This article will outline Xamarin Forms and Xamarin’s strengths backed by nearly 10 years of actual experience.
Xamarin is a mature platform
Believe it or not, but the idea for Xamarin started in 2001, back then some people wanted to make .NET applications run on Linux systems. The project became called Mono and it continued to grow to include a version of Silverlight also from Microsoft. Mono support was then made for iPhone and Android. These are still the underlying technologies used in Xamarin. Not only that, but popular game making engine Unity3D also uses Mono to solve the cross-platform problem.
More than just Android and iOS
The Difference between Xamarin and other solutions, is that it can create applications that run on Windows and Mac. Plus, with support already for the new mobile operating system Tizen and Windows WPF.
Xamarin Forms is getting better and better
When Xamarin Forms first came out, it was too early for a serious production app. Now it is version 4 with a strong community of developers so it is a perfect choice. Some people regard Xamarin Forms as a prototyping tool or for an enterprise applications. This is an old judgement from years ago and is not relevant today.
Less Developers needed
Xamarin Forms is a fantastic option if you have 1-2 developers. They should be passionate about mobile development and know Xamarin Forms really well. Especially if they understand MVVM really well and how to architect the code well. I’ve personally seen many solutions where poor choices led to spaghetti code. The blame was put on Xamarin Forms rather than what the developers created.
I recommend 3 developers as the minimum when using Xamarin Forms in a team structure.
Xamarin Forms has Xamarin
Obviously Xamarin Forms uses Xamarin, it’s important to remember that the business logic can be shared.
