Why Use Xamarin for Mobile App Development?

5 min readSep 10, 2018

Are you thinking about developing your business presence on Mobile? And looking for a team of dedicated mobile developers. In this article, we will give you a walk through on why Xamarin framework is the best for your mobile development needs. Xamarin is the latest tech tool for startup businesses everywhere that need a cross-platform mobile app.

What is Cross-platform mobile development?

Cross-platform mobile refers to the development of mobile apps that work on multiple mobile platforms. For example, a cross-platform mobile application runs easily on different mobile operating systems like Android, iOS, Windows, BlackBerry. There are many Cross-platform frameworks that exist such as Qt, Xamarin, Phonegap, Ionic, React Native to support cross-platform development. In this post below, I am going to talk about Xamarin in particular and the reasons to use Xamarin for cross-platform development.

Xamarin Introduction

Xamarin is a cross-platform framework for mobile app development that brings .NET and C# to both Android and iOS platforms. Xamarin is amazing in the sense that it is full .NET based and is able to produce true Android and iOS mobile apps concurrently.
Wikipedia defines Xamarin as: Xamarin is a Microsoft-owned San Francisco, California based software company founded in May 2011 by the engineers that created Mono, Mono for Android and MonoTouch that are cross-platform implementations of the Common Language Infrastructure (CLI) and Common Language Specifications (often called Microsoft.NET).

Why Xamarin?

Xamarin Is Ideal for Cross Platform Mobile App Development and the major reasons are listed below:

Power of C# on mobile devices
Open Source
Native apps with native UI controls
Native UI development
Can share more than 70–80% of code across all major mobile platforms
No JavaScript — truly compiled code
Ability to leverage visual studio
Many great C# libraries
MVVM pattern
Amazing support
Powerful Mono .NET framework for developers
Delivers high performance and excellent UX
Most cost- and time-efficient cross-platform framework for mobile app development.
Compatible to develop Hybrid apps using portable razor framework
Backed by Microsoft
Support Smart Watch apps.

“We founded Xamarin more than [four] years ago with the mission to make native mobile development fast, easy, and fun and to help C# developers build beautiful mobile apps and reach billions of devices. We love the native iOS, Android, and Mac APIs and we love C#.” — Nat Friedman, CEO and cofounder of Xamarin

The popularity of Xamarin

If you have not tried Xamarin yet, you are missing a great deal on the latest tech enabler in the industry. With Xamarin framework, we can cover all major mobile platforms like Android, iOS and Windows without diluting the quality and performance as a rule.

“Over 15,000 companies rely on Xamarin.” — Xamarin

Renowned companies like Cognizant, Bosch, Siemens, LEAP, 3M, Slack and Pinterest rely on XAMARIN for their mobile app development source

Two Approaches in Xamarin Architecture

Xamarin has two methods for building cross platform mobile applications: Xamarin Forms — You can use Xamarin.Forms when you want to design your app one time which will be shared across all platforms with some minor code changes. Xamarin Native — You can use native when you want to design separate applications for each platform with a help of Xamarin.iOS, Xamarin.Android, Xamarin.Windows.

The Difference between Xamarin Forms and Xamarin Native

Xamarin.iOS, Xamarin.Android & Xamarin. Windows

Separate UI for each platform
Supports up to 70% code reuse
Development cycle is a bit slower in comparison
Need to learn all-existing platforms specific native UI views
Xamarin Native has a large variety of UI and third party components library.
Xamarin Native App development comparatively costs higher.
Xamarin Native app’s performance is the best.
Xamarin Native is recommended where custom UI is more important than code sharing.
Xamarin Native are best for apps with interactions that require native behavior.
Xamarin native has a stronger mechanism to clear the cache.
Xamarin Native is used to create complex and advanced UI.
Xamarin Native supports Non-Portable .NET Libraries.
Xamarin Native apps are better suited for large quantity of data and it is also effective for frequent data update.
Xamarin Native is best for apps that require specialized interactions

Xamarin Forms

Single UI for all platforms
It allows more code sharing (90–95% code reuse)
Development cycle is faster.
No need to learn all-existing platforms specific native UI views.
Xamarin Forms has little third party components library.
Xamarin Forms App development significantly reduces overall cost
Xamarin Forms performance is slightly slow.
Xamarin Forms is recommended where code sharing is more important than custom UI.
Xamarin.Forms is best for apps that require little platform-specific functionality.
Xamarin Forms have unconvincing mechanism to clear the cache.
Forms is used for apps with no much constraints on the UI.
Xamarin Forms does not support some of the third party component libraries.
Xamarin Forms apps are not ideal for large quantity of data and not effective for frequent data update.
Xamarin.Forms is best for apps that are data driven (listviews, data entry fields)

Xamarin is an excellent powerful platform that supports Cross-platform mobile development at a fractional cost. Xamarin Cross Platform Development has gained massive popularity during the recent years. Xamarin platform makes a significant savings in development time, maintenance and overall client costs. Apart from these benefits, Xamarin apps also deliver a great performance and user experience.