Your own application, when distributed on the App Store, may very well be built with a different toolchain version which may trigger different compatibility flags. Obviously this will be set to the SDK that microsoft used when they distributed Live Player to the App Store. iOS and UIKit enable and disable various compatibility behaviours depending on the iOS SDK used to link the native app you are launching. * Won't show up as a separate app on the device (so you can't test that your app icon is OK, or use push notifications, or any other apple service that needs per-app-id provisioning) So there are a couple of additional important limitations then, probably (beyond the speed loss of interpreting instead of compiling) To sum it up: it's more work to write a xamarin application when I'm more than capable of handling 2 similar languages (most app requirements are just applying known patterns and library gluing anyways) or using Exponent/ReactNative.Īs a side note, I prefer F# and while the Xamarin team says they "like it", it is a pretty 2nd class system and definitely not something you want to use with a deadline. I could spend the time building the 10 custom widgets that the client REALLY wants (even though the app could work fine without it), or I could use native/RN UI libraries to wow the client giving them what they wanted and a little bit more in the same visual/design style.
Quite a few I wanted to use were abandoned with no source code and just a link to download the nuget from the xamarin store. Net ecosystem for a while, and while the way libraries are written isn't my favorite (OverkillOOP sometimes), everything is consistent. Building your own libraries and widgets is fun, but not when you have a deadline. I built 2 PoC apps that later got translated into swift/java and react-native respectively. Native was something I really wanted to like. It makes sense it being a targeted API so I'll leave it at that. Odd bugs and restrictions that require dense workarounds occur if you deviate from the standard application uses (tables and forms). Replicating good existing features that other environments have (like exponent, etc) is a good sign that things are progressing.īuilding apps with Xamarin however is still not a pleasant experience whether it be Native or Forms.Īlthough Microsoft has built some cool apps with forms (check the microsoft github and you can find them), it's still a pain to work with things visually. It's cool to see xamarin growing after the microsoft acquisition. A bunch of games that look pretty slick (I've downloaded a few and flipped through some of the screens) BitWarden (it's made the rounds recently on HN)
Here's a list of decent looking Xamarin apps:
Sounds like they just use Xamarin Test Cloud. Its mobile quality engineers view test reports to see how features look and behave on devices - and can quickly solve customer issues." Over three million daily users rely on Slack to communicate with their teams, and Xamarin Test Cloud helps Slack make sure customers are productive in all scenarios. Given its preeminence in the enterprise and among mobile workforces, mobile is critical to Slack’s success. "Slack's friendly, easy to use messaging platform is the future of work. There's nothing in that description that indicates the Slack app is written using Xamarin.