Apple Xcode vs GeneXus vs Xamarin Platform comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide
Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between Apple Xcode, GeneXus, and Xamarin Platform based on real PeerSpot user reviews.

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Featured Review
Quotes From Members
We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use.
Here are some excerpts of what they said:
Pros
"The tool's most valuable features are debugging and code management.""We like the ease of access and navigation that this solution provides.""Xcode is pretty smart. It's easy to set up and works perfectly on Android.""It is stable and user-friendly.""It is complete and relevant to the job at hand.""Xcode has quite a bit of code error checking built-in, which is great. It also goes a step further and suggests fixes.""The most valuable feature of Apple Xcode is that it is up to date."

More Apple Xcode Pros →

"The solution provides ease of programming and the speed of delivery of demands.""This solution works extremely quickly in terms of enabling an application in a production environment.""With GeneXus, we can create logical representations of transactions in the form of objects.""I find the implementation process of GeneXus to be easy.""In Knowledge Base, being able to model the workflow before developing the screens is great. We first work with the tables or the transactions using GeneXus and then we work on the screens.""I like the testing models, which allow me to create unit or interface tests of my programs. It helps us avoid missed deadlines because we can detect all the errors before deploying the new versions of the solution. And I also like the integration with coding managers like DevOps or Jenkins. It enables us to do versioning.""With the solution, I can work a normal day. I can plan my work and any other activities for days ahead.""The front-end features are the most valuable."

More GeneXus Pros →

"Xamarin is well-integrated with Visual Studio so it will feel very familiar to you once you start.""Test Cloud, Calabash, SpecFlow, and Xamarin.UITest are the features which can’t be ignored because just writing code doesn’t mean your app will run flawlessly. You need to test your app on each possible device and configuration, which you can do easily.""The solution is easy to understand and has banking integrated. The shorter development time, the bugging and as well as availability of a lot of documentation on the web. Also the native integration is easy.""The combination of forms for cross-platform UI and C-Sharp for the programming language are my two favorite features.""The ability to share a platform-agnostic common core, or business logic, enables a mobile developer to write code for all targeted mobile platforms, independent of the individual developer's specialization in iOS, Android, or Windows. This helps not only during development but also enables easier maintenance of deployed apps, since bug fixes or feature additions can be often made in the platform-agnostic layer.""You can just write one XM channel core and it'll be used for both iOS and Android.""The cross platform ability is a great asset.""It usually saves time for application development. We write once and the code works everywhere."

More Xamarin Platform Pros →

Cons
"As Apple has introduced more and more features on top of Xcode, it sometimes, but very rarely, hangs.""There should be additional documentation on App Store deployment. In terms of features, they're pretty much on top of where they need to go. I've been happy with its progress so far. As things evolve, they need to evolve to match that need.""The size of Apple Xcode could improve. It is too large.""There is a drag-and-drop visual system, but as soon as you do something dynamic, then you are unable to use it.""It consists of multiple components and needs a simplified process. This particular area could be more stable.""It is a bit challenging to sign in.""We would like a 'light' version of this solution to be developed, as it currently uses a lot of memory space."

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"It would be better if GeneXus had a wiki. The developer needs some experience to work with the tools. It would be better if they could improve the community. If we have some problem, I open a ticket that takes us to a board, and I have to describe my issue in detail. If the tools have a general community for us to explore with some videos or some articles, I think that that may help the developer.""I told them to add something about Angular. They're already working on adding it.""The graphical interface could be improved. I also notice some performance problems on hardware that should be more than adequate. GeneXus uses a lot of RAM and other computer resources.""GeneXus is a wonderful tool for the backend. It's the best in the world, but for the frontend, GeneXus needs to improve. There should be easier steps for managing various aspects, such as alerts and messages to show to the end-users.""It would be helpful to have additional assisted processing with training.""Documentation is always an issue. In order to develop with GeneXus, there is very little documentation. The documentation is not clear enough in order to develop a great tool.""GeneXus's user interface has room for improvement.""It's expensive for a company."

More GeneXus Cons →

"The solution always has room for improvement with price, integration, stability, and documentation.""There are compatibility issues between versions of various Xamarin components.""I would like to see hot reload, similar to what Flutter has out-of-the-box. There is "Live Reload" but it’s still in preview and was only recently announced.""The architecture in the Xamarin Platform has to improve, there are some features missing.""We have noticed that there have been stability-based performance issues with this product, which need to be improved.""The problem that I faced was that the communication, the roles, and the responsibilities, weren't defined between Microsoft and Xamarin.""For those who use only XAML to design the UI, it would be better if there was a better XAML previewer or designer.""I feel that the Android AppCompat library creates a lot of issues. A lot of development time is often wasted solving these issues."

More Xamarin Platform Cons →

Pricing and Cost Advice
  • "It has an annual renewal."
  • "There are no licensing costs for Xcode and no hidden charges. You just download it."
  • "You can start off using Apple Xcode for free but if you start using some more of their enhanced features, it's going to be hundreds of dollars a month. There are corporate licenses but most individual users will not be worried about the corporate license, only your CFO will or the person in charge of the software department."
  • "We don't have to pay for Apple Xcode's licenses."
  • More Apple Xcode Pricing and Cost Advice →

  • "The solution is very expensive."
  • "I don't know about the price because I am an employee, but I hear it's cheaper than other tools."
  • "This solution offers multi-plan licenses, depending on the size of the company and the features required, as opposed to being priced per user/device."
  • "The cost of a GeneXus license is extremely high. At the same time, one person using the solution can do the work of three Java or data developers. I think that's why they charge so much. It's too expensive, which is one reason it isn't widely used."
  • "It's expensive. I'd rate it a four out of ten in terms of pricing."
  • "I give the cost of the solution a four out of ten."
  • "The price is good."
  • "I know that its licenses are generally per year, and in the past, the license for GeneXus was around $5,000, but I don't know what's the current price of the GeneXus license."
  • More GeneXus Pricing and Cost Advice →

  • "In most cases, it is sufficient to have free/community license. But if you plan to seriously develop production-level, highly polished apps, you need to use Xamarin.Profiler and the professional or enterprise license."
  • "For personal use, the Community Edition is free."
  • "This is a free product, so there is zero investment on licenses and IDE."
  • "Xamarin is available under several licensing arrangements. Each developer needs one license at least. All features, especially the Profiler, unlock only with the highest tier."
  • "It saved a lot of time and resources needed to develop a cross platform mobile app."
  • "Xamarin is free, or comes with Visual Studio. Therefore, it is very profitable."
  • "The price of the Xamarin Platform is not expensive. However, the price of the solution depends on the application that is made. For example, if you have small applications, it's different from large or enterprise applications."
  • "There's no licensing cost for Xamarin."
  • More Xamarin Platform Pricing and Cost Advice →

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    Questions from the Community
    Top Answer:The tool's most valuable features are debugging and code management.
    Top Answer:Apple Xcode's usability for developers needs enhancement. It consists of multiple components and needs a simplified… more »
    Top Answer:GeneXus evolves with technology.
    Top Answer:The tool needs to be tuned before being used. You need some experience to get the best out of the tool.
    Top Answer:The tool helps to build systems that work to capture and check data.
    Top Answer:Xamarin.Forms reduced the effort and time to build and market our solution, market our features, and get our solution… more »
    Top Answer:You can build in Xamarin without paying any money. What costs money is the IDE, Visual Studio, Professional, or… more »
    Top Answer:There are issues with Xamarin, such as when you run into errors doing something called linking. When you build your… more »
    Ranking
    Views
    942
    Comparisons
    364
    Reviews
    5
    Average Words per Review
    365
    Rating
    7.4
    Views
    661
    Comparisons
    353
    Reviews
    12
    Average Words per Review
    511
    Rating
    8.6
    Views
    1,517
    Comparisons
    1,062
    Reviews
    19
    Average Words per Review
    577
    Rating
    7.9
    Comparisons
    Learn More
    Overview

    Apple Xcode is a comprehensive suite of developer tools for producing programs for the Mac, iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch, and Apple TV. Xcode creates a streamlined workflow for user interface design, coding, testing, debugging, and app store submission.

    Xcode is an IDE (integrated development environment) designed for both novice and expert developers to use, and it is the only tool that is officially supported for designing and uploading programs to Apple's app store. Xcode contains all of the tools required to construct an app in a single software package, including a text editor, a compiler, and a build system. It includes a number of tools to speed up the development process so that seasoned developers may produce apps with lightning speed and beginners can create apps with ease.

    As a code editor, Xcode supports a wide range of programming languages, including C, C++, Objective-C, Objective-C++, Java, AppleScript, Python, Ruby, ResEdit, and Swift.

    It employs the Java, Carbon, and Cocoa programming models.

    Apple XCode Features

    Apple XCode has many valuable key features. Some of the most useful ones include:

    • The new single target supports many platforms and conditionally includes dependencies, code, resources, and build parameters for particular systems.
    • Downloadable simulator runtimes for the most recent versions of watchOS and tvOS.
    • To improve parallelism and spot build performance concerns, a new assistant editor can build logs and display the build timeline.
    • Regex support, including syntax highlighting and playgrounds inline results for rapid iteration.
    • Support for iPadOS DriverKit driver development.
    • Asset catalog allows you to upload a single 1024 x 1024 pixel app icon, and it will be automatically resized for the target.
    • Debugging: The memory graph debugger now shows all incoming and outgoing memory graph references.
    • Documentation: Swift-DocC facilitates the creation of documentation for Objective-C and C APIs. The Swift-DocC documentation that Xcode 14 generates is now compatible with the majority of managed hosting services, including GitHub Pages.
    • Instruments: The new Swift Concurrency template tracks the application and behavior of Swift's concurrency primitives. The new Hang Tracing tool demonstrates when the main thread of an app is unable to handle incoming events.
    • Localization: Swift localization packages can be exported.
    • Organizer: New diagnostic reports on app hangs.
    • Previews: New design supports automatically generated variants for appearance, accessibility, sizes, and more. It is interactive by default.
    • Source editor: Enhanced code completion with top-level initializers, overloads consolidated into a single row, and a better default argument experience. As you scroll, code structure pins to the top of the source editor. Jump to definition and callers includes a brand-new user interface that assists you in distinguishing between overloads and call locations.
    • Swift packages in Xcode, command and build plug-in integration.

    Reviews from Real Users

    A founder of a tech vendor writes of the solution, “It was essential. You can't develop mobile apps for the Apple platforms without it. I would rate it a nine out of 10 for its consistency. It keeps evolving.”

    What is GeneXus? GeneXus™ is the best Low-Code Platform that you don't know yet.

    It's a Software Development Platform that simplifies and automates the tasks of creating and evolving enterprise applications and multi-channel user-experiences. Great Advantages:

    - Higher productivity, with automatic maintenance & evolution
    - Multi-Experience, we continuously create new code generators
    - Agile, incremental approach, with fully functional prototypes
    - Easier to learn, one single language to cover all technologies
    - Future-proof, we've been around for 30 years, evolving for you

    Key Differentiators against the competition:

    - No runtime fees, we charge by developer
    - Best theoretical framework, which allows us to evolve
    - Best coverage in the market: Most technologies, most languages, most markets and industries
    - We run on-premise or on the cloud
    - Multiple starting points depending on the type of company you work in, with products for Students, Startups, ISVs, Corporate Development, and SAP technologies

    GeneXus uses Artificial Intelligence techniques to create software, enabling truly incremental development of apps, providing a low-code, future-proof development platform for the leading execution platforms and languages, and the most popular DBMS.

    Xamarin is an open-source platform for developing modern and performant applications for iOS, Android, and Windows using.NET. Xamarin is an abstraction layer that manages how shared code is communicated to the platform's underlying code. Xamarin is for developers with the two following goals:

    • Cross-platform sharing of code, tests, and business logic.

    • Writing cross-platform apps in C# with Visual Studio.

    Xamarin allows developers to share an average of 90% of their program across platforms. This enables programmers to achieve native performance, look, and feel on each platform while writing all of their business logic in a single language (or reusing existing application code).

    Xamarin applications can be created on a PC or a Mac and compiled into native application packages, such as an .apk file for Android or an .ipa file for iOS.

    Xamarin Platform Features

    Xamarin Platform has many valuable key features. Some of the most useful ones include:

    • Complete binding for the supporting SDKs: Xamarin includes bindings for almost all of the underlying platform SDKs in iOS and Android.
    • Java, C, Objective-C, C, C++ Interop: Xamarin gives you the ability to use a variety of third-party code by providing tools for directly invoking Objective-C, Java, C, and C++ libraries.
    • Modern language constructs: Xamarin applications are written in C#, a modern language with many capabilities that Objective-C and Java do not have, like lambdas, LINQ, parallel programming, generics, and more.
    • Strong base class library (BCL): Xamarin apps use the .NET BCL, a large collection of classes with streamlined features, like powerful XML, database, serialization, IO, string, and networking support, among others.

    Xamarin Platform Benefits

    There are many benefits to implementing the Xamarin Platform. Some of the biggest advantages the solution offers include:

    • Native UIs and APIs: Xamarin delivers comprehensive access to each platform's native SDK and UI controls, projecting the entire native API of each device into C#. Therefore, the apps you develop are native instead of write-once/run-anywhere programs that look alien on every platform. Xamarin provides you access to all of the capabilities that distinguish each platform.
    • Share code between platforms: With Xamarin, you can share all code across platforms while providing a native user interface tailored to each individual device. With Xamarin, you can execute the same C# code on iOS, Android, and Windows Phone. With Xamarin, your software is compiled to a native binary rather than being interpreted, in contrast to other cross-platform frameworks. Even in the most demanding situations, native compilation provides users with excellent app performance. Xamarin provides responsive, multi-user input and feedback, fluid scrolling, sophisticated graphics and animations, complicated data visualization, and realistic high frame rates for games.
    • Code with C#: Write shorter, more concise, and more maintainable code by leveraging advanced language features, such as Language Integrated Query (LINQ), delegates, lambdas, events, garbage collection, and many other features. With Xamarin's fully extensible platform, you can include libraries written in C, Objective-C, C++, or Java. In C#, you have access to the entire native ecosystem of components and libraries.

    Sample Customers
    Information Not Available
    Canal de Panamá, Gerdau, Coca-Cola, Mercado Libre, DHL, Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, TECNISA, Mexican Polak Group, Ferrovalle, Canon, Azteca, KPMG, TURBUS, Santander, BBVA
    Cinemark, MixRadio, Sqor Sports, Storyo, JetBlue, The World Bank, Cr_dito Agrcola, Applied Research Associates
    Top Industries
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Computer Software Company18%
    Financial Services Firm11%
    Educational Organization8%
    Construction Company7%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Computer Software Company19%
    Comms Service Provider12%
    Government9%
    Financial Services Firm8%
    REVIEWERS
    Financial Services Firm25%
    Music Company13%
    Manufacturing Company13%
    Computer Software Company13%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Computer Software Company16%
    Manufacturing Company11%
    Financial Services Firm11%
    Educational Organization8%
    Company Size
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business43%
    Midsize Enterprise14%
    Large Enterprise43%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business32%
    Midsize Enterprise15%
    Large Enterprise53%
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business85%
    Large Enterprise15%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business31%
    Midsize Enterprise8%
    Large Enterprise61%
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business47%
    Midsize Enterprise14%
    Large Enterprise39%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business24%
    Midsize Enterprise15%
    Large Enterprise60%
    Buyer's Guide
    Mobile Development Platforms
    March 2024
    Find out what your peers are saying about OutSystems, Mendix, Salesforce and others in Mobile Development Platforms. Updated: March 2024.
    765,386 professionals have used our research since 2012.