Pros and Cons of Xamarin

When I worked in [Hatching Lab][http://www.hatchinglab.com], I did some initial study of Xamarin and decided not to use it eventually. We did however, decide to use Ionic for a news app afterwards. Maybe I’ll write something about it later.

Pros

• Cross-platform: the same code runs on both iOS and Android
• As a cross-platform solution, it’s based on native UI compoentns so the performance is not as bad as PhoneGap etc.
• As an app oriented solution, an experienced Xamarin developer will be able to deliver an app faster than game based solutions like Cocos2d-js
• Best for a mockup apps since they don’t require a lot of UI customisation, i.e. doing the most basic things

Cons

• As a cross-platform solution it doesn’t support platforms as many as Cocos2d-js does
• Unlike Cocos2d-js which is free, Xamarin costs $999 a year for business plan
• Lastest support for each platform (iOS / Android) is always slow since Xamarin doesn’t have a better channel to work with Apple & Google than any other native developers
• To become a good Xamarin developer, one needs to master C#, .NET, Xamarin SDK, Xamarin IDE / VS, so:
• An experienced Xamarin developer is hard to find and the eco system based on Xamarin is not as strong as native iOS / Android community, e.g. in stackoverflow tags
  • android: 603,241
  • objective-c: 211,677
  • xamarin: 13703
  • swift: 37441 (and it’s only released less than half a year while xamarin is there for years)
• Smaller ecosystem means it’s harder to find answers and will lead to longer time of problem solving
• Harder to integrate with open source iOS / Android libraries
• Harder to make an app with a well-designed UI

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