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Of course, there is no single answer, but we can look at a few main use cases and weigh up some pros and cons.īoth Xamarin.Native and Forms have got this covered, but with XF your UI is created with an easy-to-use flavor of XAML. Well, given the current rate of progress that the Xamarin.Forms team is making, with the help of the open-source community, it might not be as big a sacrifice as you think. How much of your pixel-perfect native UI can you sacrifice in order to achieve that goal of fully cross-platform? Of course, this is no worse that being in a fully native stack-at least you have a common language and development environment-but now it’s time to make that decision. Then comes the UI…Įvery component from this point upwards in the stack is back to being written individually for each platform. So, using Xamarin.Native you have shared backend code, a single language, an easier learning curve for. The combination of Xamarin.iOS, Xamarin.Android and Xamarin.Forms could get you upwards of 90% code sharing depending on the complexity of your application. Xamarin.Forms, however, provides an abstraction of the underlying platforms UI components and exposes them in an easy-to-use markup language. You can, of course, still use C# for the UI but code re-use at this layer will be necessarily limited. iOS and Android have very different approaches to user interface layout. With Xamarin.Forms, that code re-use even extends to the user interface. Business logic and backend code is fully shared and has complete access to the underlying platform. Using Xamarin, the entire app is written in C#. Separate tools, languages and very different skills. The iOS app would likely be created in Swift from start to finish-the Android app with Java. With traditional native development, creating an app for iOS and Android would be two completely separate projects. NET framework with specific libraries for iOS, macOS, Android and others. It began way back in 2011 with Mono for Android and MonoTouch. Xamarin is an open-source platform from Microsoft for building iOS and Android apps with C# and. For completeness, however, let’s have a brief recap. If you are at a point where you are considering the choice between Xamarin.Native and Xamarin.Forms, then you are likely familiar with what Xamarin is. You can take those time and cost savings even further with Xamarin.Forms, but when should you, and why wouldn't you? What is Xamarin? Xamarin.Native (Xamarin.iOS and Xamarin.Android) is a great way to achieve code re-use and make the most of your.
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Xamarin.Forms can take your Xamarin.Native skills even further, but there are times it makes more sense than others.
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