Is Xamarin Worth Choosing For Cross-Platform Development?

The competition on the web is so aggressive today that every business, in order to stay on the top of their league, embraces the latest and finest technologies. When it comes to mobile application development, you just can’t afford to be ignorant as it might land you in a pothole.

Here, we are going to talk about cross-platform development which indubitably brings in Xamarin. A name so prevalent in the field of development, it is bound to have some of the most remarkable characteristics and features. But does it really counts amongst the best option for cross-platform development?

Before deciding on which platform to support, a thorough study of the requirements with an end-user focus is necessary. You do not want to start coding an app for one platform only to realize midway that you need it for another platform.

This question can only be answered after a detailed discussion of Xamarin and what it brings along. Let’s get started.

Xamarin.Forms
Xamarin.Forms is a library that enables you to build native UIs for iOS, Android and Windows from a single, shared C#codebase. It provides more than 40 cross-platform controls and layouts which are mapped to native controls at runtime, which implies that your user interfaces are fully native. Delivered as a portable class library, Xamarin.Forms makes it easy to mix and match your shared UI code with the platform-specific user interface APIs.

Major IDE Enhancements

Massive Visual Update – Xamarin Studio includes a welcome screen, hundreds of new icons, improved support for Retina displays, and some impressive touches throughout the IDE.
Streamlined Visual Studio support – It combines iOS and Android extensions into a single Visual Studio extension, streamlines installation and updates for all users and improves the build and debugging experience.
NuGet – Xamarin includes full support for using NuGet packages in mobile apps – in Visual Studio or Xamarin Studio – enabling you to take advantage of the numerous NuGet packages which ship with Xamarin compatibility.
F# Support – Xamarin Studio ships with built-in support for building iOS and Android apps using the increasingly-popular F# functional programming language.

Improved Code Sharing
Xamarin introduces two great code sharing techniques for cross-platform apps:

Shared Projects
these provide a simple yet clean approach for code sharing to the developers. Xamarin developers can easily use Shared Projects to share code across iOS, Android, and Windows.
Portable Class Libraries
These are consumable across a diverse range of .NET platforms. Xamarin can both produce and consume PCLs from both Xamarin Studio and Visual Studio.

SDK Integration
Xamarin works with the latest SDKs and utilizes some of the common and platform-specific APIs. It strongly binds APIs and SDKs of multiple platforms in order to generate high-quality applications. Furthermore, this unique SDK integration helps in providing support for new features, as soon as they are inserted in the operating system of the device.

Final Thoughts
So, somewhere or the other it is quite clear that Xamarin, as a cross-platform development tool, has a huge scope. With a number of eye-popping features, it is certainly a wise option to choose either by a xamarin expert or mobile app development company.