A REVIEW OF CROSS PLATFORM DEVELOPMENT WITH XAMARIN

According to Xamarin, there are a number of reasons to use the cross-platform development software for mobile application development. Depending on what camp you are in, there are a number of reasons not to use Xamarin for mobile application development. Some would argue that the initial apparent cost savings for a cross-platform application written in a single software language and executed on multiple platforms supersedes any other requirement. The caveat is that the perceived cost savings are not as apparent as they should be. Native application development gives the most direct path to the operating system API’s. The development in Xamarin adds an additional layer, since access to the operating system API are all provided via C# libraries, which are an abstraction layer to the actual API’s.

As of this time, Xamarin is a niche solution that has a fit for a small segment of the market. There are a few development shops offering strictly Xamarin solutions. I am of the opinion that Xamarin will continue to be a niche solution, but it will not be able to provide a compelling reason to develop native mobile application over using Xcode (Objective C or Swift) for iOS and Android Studio (Java) for Android, even at the cost of developing the two code bases for each platform.

TESTING XAMARIN

Using Xamarin was relatively painless and easy. The Xamarin Studio Integrated Development Environment (IDE) running on the Mac was as intuitive to use as Microsoft Visual Studio and Android Studio. Creating a new project was simple and fast, and it was great that Git integration was built into the Xamarin Studio. There were a few annoyances where it was clear that the Xamarin Studio on the Mac was not as complete or robust as the Windows version and it appeared that the product was in development. Building a sample application to run on both iOS and Android was simple enough.

The Xamarin IDE performed adequately with the iOS emulators on my Mac. It was only when my attempt to run the same application as an Android Solution that I was not able to get the Android emulator to run. Every attempt at configuring the Android emulator to work with Xamarin Studio failed.

Upon creating a second application, I decided to create the sample Phoneword project that was posted in the Xamarin training web site. The Xamarin IDE provides the standard “auto-complete” for code development, and it seemed to come naturally and intuitively to auto-complete when I was coding. I was able to build the sample application but still could not get the application to run under the Android emulator.

One interesting observation that came to me when switching back and forth from C# in Xamarin and Android Java is how similar the languages seem. With the IDE auto-complete, the syntax of the languages does not represent any barriers and the languages seemed almost interchangeable. One of the things that pleased me is that Xamarin maintains the External Strings paradigm that are native to iOS and Android development.