Xamarin Platform Pros and Cons

For me, developing apps for iOS and Android is a dream came true, without migrating to Objective-C or Java. Xamarin enables me to do so.

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.

Plugins like MvvmCross make a developer’s life easy.

The Xamarin platform can reduce overhead significantly through code-share and reuse. The typical team size for a Xamarin project is significantly reduced compared to purely native projects.

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.

It has significantly reduced the skill barrier for development and testers.

The most important impact is the reduction in product lifecycle costs.

It significantly reduces development and test costs, and ensures that there is synergy between the platforms on product features and user experience.

Recently, Xamarin has added a lot of features such as Effects, Behaviors, Triggers, etc. This has made the UI user-friendly, lively, and attractive.

We were able to optimize the service organization for one of our clients.

It allows us to reuse our knowledge of C# and .NET Framework.

The most valuable features are: One language for all platforms: C#; XAML for UI in Xamarin.Forms; provides 100 percent coverage of APIs on each platform.

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

Their leadership is exceptional at both listening to the customer base and delivering innovative, best-in-class products.

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

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

The cross platform ability is a great asset.

We very much like the XAML design techniques, multiple layout and pages, MVVMCross support, and portability across different platforms.

Because of the C# programming language, we can train our .NET developers to learn Xamarin and develop mobile apps easily.

All Xamarin library issues need to be taken care of as a top priority.

There is room for increasing the scale a little bit further with the designer in the Visual Studio, more specifically, Xamarin.Android Designer in Visual Studio.

Xamarin's profiling tools are only available for the highest tier of MSDN subscription and compatibility with platform-native profiling tools is rather lacking. This causes friction when working on performance-related issues.

For beginners, the entire setup can be overwhelming because it involves setting up development environments for iOS, Android, and Windows at the same time if you want to target all three.

The worst build issue concerns are the caching process MSBuild uses to reduce the build time.

I feel that the Android AppCompat library creates a lot of issues. A lot of development time is often wasted solving these issues.

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.

From time to time, it is a bit harder to code some specific scenarios compared to the native approach.

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.

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

There is limited support for UX widgets.

There are compatibility issues between versions of various Xamarin components.

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.

It needs offline sync capabilities to store data on devices persistently.