Xamarin (Microsoft)

BACKGROUND

Please provide a brief description of your company and the role you play there.

Technoduce Info Solutions is a mobile application development company that creates applications for all mobile platforms. We have a team of people who combine their technological expertise with a passion for innovation. In addition to developing applications, we also provide ready-made solutions for clients that help them develop their own custom applications. I am the chief executive officer of Technoduce.

SOLUTION

What advantages does Xamarin have over other cross-development platforms?

The core benefit of the Xamarin platform is that it requires only a single code base for developing applications on all platforms. Its underlying language is C#, and thus projects can be structured to share code that can also be used on many types of mobile phones. Xamarin can also be used to detect bugs and flaws in an app. Simply put, the code reusability feature of Xamarin makes it easier for developers.

What disadvantages do you see with Xamarin?

Xamarin leaves a larger footprint, requires a longer download time and occupies more storage space. The code cannot be shared with other platforms. The support community has a limited capacity for providing instant remedies, and there is only limited sharing of UI [user interface] code across iOS and Android systems.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

Could you share any success, metrics, or overall results related to your use of Xamarin?

The single code base of Xamarin helps in the faster development of applications with fewer platform-specific bugs. Xamarin makes it easier to develop native apps with its device-specific features while its unique binding technology enables easy updating of features on all devices. Finally, we can select several components for development directly from the Xamarin Component Store.

What are the features or tools of Xamarin that have most impressed you?

Xamarin Designer for iOS removes the necessity of waiting for changes in the coding to sync, and their Studio is the best IDE [integrated development environment] for creating native and desktop applications. I like Xamarin.forms for its ability to share large chunks of our code across platforms, and their Test Cloud enables immediate location of bugs before apps are launched. Finally, their UI uses native controls on each platform making them indistinguishable from each other,

Are there any areas of the software that are not as strong and could be added or improved upon?

The XAML works slowly, making it difficult to access the controls. Moreover, the support community for Xamarin is of limited help in times of emergencies. The inability to scroll both directions in Android apps built with Xamarin is an added concern.

What has been your experience utilizing Xamarin's support resources?

The support service for Xamarin isn't all that much help. It takes too much time for their support resources to diagnose a problem thoroughly and offer a solution. The staff at Xamarin needs to work more on this aspect of their service.

Finally, we have a few quick questions, and for each question we ask you to rate Xamarin on a scale of one to five, with five being the best. What would you give Xamarin for the functionality of available features?

Four.

What would you give the software for ease of use or ease of implementation into your business?

Four.

For support, as in responsiveness of the Xamarin team or helpfulness of the available resources?

Three.

What is your overall satisfaction with Xamarin?

Three.

How likely are you to recommend Xamarin to a friend, colleague or someone in a similar business?

Four.

BACKGROUND

Please provide a brief description of your company.

NZ Technologies is a team of more than 30 highly qualified, skilled professionals in the mobile and web applications domain. We provide both complete and partial application development, with a strong focus on project maintenance, allowing us to develop long-term relationships with our many clients – typically small to medium-level companies. We also work as contractors for several employers. Our core specialization is Xamarin, DNN [DotNetNuke], and NOP [no operation] web applications and software development.

Who is the ideal client for an app developed with Xamarin?

An ideal client for apps developed in Xamarin is one with an app that has an extended maintenance cycle. Making a cross-platform app in Xamarin involves special design patterns to partition the code so that the entire business logic can be shared between all the mobile platforms. For small apps, this is not cost-effective but, for larger apps or small apps with extended support and maintenance cycles, sharing of the business logic can be profitable since only one module needs to be modified in order to add new features or make modifications to the existing business logic.

SOLUTION

What advantages does Xamarin have over other cross-development platforms?

Xamarin has several advantages. It allows the business logic to be shared between all mobile platforms and creates native apps as opposed to code that runs in WebView. As such, all advantages that come with a native app come with Xamarin, such as a smooth native user interface experience. In addition, developers can use a consistent set of nonmobile APIs using the .NET platform, instead of having to use a different set of nonmobile APIs for iOS, Android and Windows phones. This makes maintenance easier since multiple codebases, APIs, and developer skills need not be maintained. Developers can also use productivity-enhancing tools, such as ReSharper, to aid in rapid code editing.

Finally, Xamarin provides 100 percent bare metal access to all native APIs and features of the mobile devices as opposed to relying on plug-ins to support native features. For simple form-based apps, even the UI [user interface] can be shared across multiple platforms using Xamarin. Forms, and their component store, allows for the use of ready-made components to expedite development.

What are the disadvantages of Xamarin?

A Xamarin app uses Mono internally and, therefore, cannot be used with other platforms, such as Unity, which also uses Mono since two Mono instances cannot run in the same thread. This is not a major problem, however, as very few apps need to integrate Xamarin and Unity. A Xamarin app maintains an internal Java and Mono instances of objects, so the memory footprint of a Xamarin app may sometimes be rather large. Sometimes, developers have to deal with bugs in the Xamarin platforms that otherwise do not exist in native toolchains.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

Can you share any successes, metrics, or other feedback related to your use of Xamarin?

We have shipped numerous mobile apps by working with Xamarin successfully, and these are always very much appreciated by our clients. For example, one client needed an app to be delivered in almost half the normal time because it was to be demonstrated at a huge event. Because Xamarin allows us to share code seamlessly, we were able to meet the deadline, and the client was very happy. There is always an advantage to using Xamarin when we are faced with that kind of time pressure.

What are the features or tools of Xamarin that have most impressed you?

Xamarin itself is a kind of glue that brings many already existing technologies – such as PCL, Shared Projects, Mono, Cocoa, Windows SDK and the Android Development Kit – together in a seamless fashion. This integration, along with the use of the component store to ease development, has been very impressive.

Are there any areas of the software that are not as strong and could be added or improved upon?

The visual UI designers are not as strong as the native Android Studio or Xcode. This forces the developers to get the .nib, storyboards, or AXML [the UI] developed in the native tools and then bring them back in for use in Xamarin. For example, in Android Studio, one can see the hex color of any set element as a color chip in the gutter or create an event handler from the UI editor itself. But, in Xamarin, this needs to be done manually. Auto completion in UI code editing is also not available.

Additionally, Xamarin developers often use an external library called MvvmCross to implement the MvvmCross pattern. Native support for such a library would be useful for non-Xamarin.Forms apps because Xamarin.Forms have limited support for the Mvvm pattern.

OVERVIEW

What has been your experience using Xamarin's support resources?

The Xamarin team and the Xamarin community have been very helpful in solving our problems.

Finally, we have a few quick questions, and for each question we ask you to rate Xamarin on a scale of one to five, with five being the best. What would you give Xamarin for the functionality of the available features?

Four.

What would you give the software for ease of use or ease of implementation into your business?

Three.

For support, as in responsiveness of the team or helpfulness of the available resources?

Three.

How likely are you to recommend Xamarin to a colleague or similar business?

Four.

Overall, what is your level of satisfaction with Xamarin?

Four.

OPPORTUNITY/CHALLENGE

What was the business challenge you were facing that encouraged you to implement Xamarin?

The biggest challenge was the cost of hardware involved with native iOS application development. Xamarin provides us with a platform to develop apps using C# [code], which a number of our team members are quite experienced with. Also with Xamarin, our ASP.NET team will be able to work with iOS applications, too, which is big plus for us.

SOLUTION

Was your company considering other platforms? Why did you choose Xamarin?

For our needs, there are no comparable solutions to Xamarin. It's has a low barrier to entry and is generally user-friendly, which has helped us to increase and speed up the development process.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

Why should clients develop an app on Xamarin as opposed to a native platform?

With Xamarin, iOS, Android, and Windows apps can all be developed on single, shared C# codebase. APIs [application programming interfaces] and data structures are also shared as well. This increases the efficiency with which you can develop apps greatly that, in turn, lowers costs for clients.

FEATURES

What are the features or tools that have most impressed you?  

The UI [user interface] components of various types, especially the charting components, are very useful. Xamarin also supports various cloud services, such as Amazon, Microsoft Azure, and Salesforce, which is helpful. Social network components, such as Pinterest and Facebook, are added easily as well.

Are there any areas of the software that are not as strong, and upon which could be added or improved?

Core Java and C-Object offer areas of improvement for Xamarin.

OVERVIEW

We have a few quick questions and, for each question, we ask you to rate the software on a scale of one to five, with five being the best. What would you give the software for functionality of the features available?

Four and a half.

What would you give the software for ease of use or ease of implementation into your business?

Four and a half.

For support, as in responsiveness of the team or helpfulness of the resources available?

Four and a half.

For overall satisfaction with the platform?

Five.

How likely are you to recommend the software to a colleague or similar business?

Five.

BACKGROUND

Can you please provide a brief description of your company?

AltexSoft is a software development services company. We provide software development services for clients throughout the world. Our focus is custom development in several stacks, like .NET. We also do PHP/HTML and JavaScript. Our core expertise for custom software development is within .NET mostly.

What role do you play there?

I am the director of research and technology. I oversee our company's technology and expertise development processes. I also lead our technology research on where to direct our internal resources with regard to the future technologies.

OPPORTUNITY/CHALLENGE

What was the business challenge your company was facing that incited the need for this platform?

Our main challenge was that we needed to enter mobile development and we were choosing between starting by developing our native mobile development expertise or trying to apply our existing .NET skills to mobile platforms. Xamarin is basically a .NET-based tool, so we decided to use Xamarin to help us apply existing skills to new platforms.

SOLUTION

How does your company implement this platform or software?

We've built a dozen small mobile applications for iOS and Android using Xamarin. Our focus as a software development company is the development of full solutions. Most are line of business products for our clients. It means that the business of our clients is built and constructed around the products we develop for them. Mobile technology is a vital part of most technology products existing on the market right now as long as that continues to be the case, we expect that cross-platform technology and Xamarin will be complementary to our main services.

Was your company considering other platforms? Why this platform?

We have evaluated the most popular platforms. There are so many cross-platform tools on the market. Our choice was based first on whether the cross-platform tool provided decent code re-usability and whether re-usability is functional between platforms, we didn't want to have to create applications for each platform from scratch. We also wanted a platform that utilized our core expertise, .NET. Lastly, the platform actually had to build useful and good-quality applications.

The modern applications are very strict, especially when it comes to user experience. Today's app platforms and tools should provide nearly perfect user experience in order to be competitive with native application development. With regard to these criteria, Xamarin was the best tool because it helped us re-use our existing .NET skills, it provided some level of code re-usability between different platforms. Although there is not as much re-usability as we would hope, Xamarin applications feel like native applications so there is no compromise for user experience, as opposed to PhoneGap and Appcelerator-based applications, which are not capable of providing native user experience.

On an annual or monthly basis, how much does your company spend to utilize the platform?

The Xamarin license is very costly. Right now, we mostly push the costs of those licenses to our clients. We typically recommend Xamarin to our clients for their long-term projects and, as part of this long-term relationship, we delegate the purchase of the licenses to our clients. We only assist them with this purchase process.

We do have internal licenses, but we only have two – one for iOS and another for Android – and we use them interchangeably between our engineers in order to build smaller short-term projects when it doesn't make sense to recommend clients to buy a license for themselves.

RESULTS

Can you share any success, metrics, or overall results of your implementation of this platform?

We noticed that the effort to build an application using Xamarin is not significantly different from building the application using a native platform, at least with the expertise our developers have. As a drawback, the number of people with Xamarin skills on the market is much lower than for native platforms. With regard to this, Xamarin is right now less likely to be used for smaller mobile projects, or when we build a project from scratch.

For us, Xamarin is the tool of choice when providing a mobile app as part of a larger solution. The advantage here is a shorter cycle for implementation of changes for the application and the larger system. The changes in the data model and the business logic model should be propagated throughout all the other layers of the system, like the web frontend, database, and constraint rules.

With regard to large systems, the mobile aspect is typically one of the smaller parts of the system. It's much easier to implement such changes when the old code base uses the same tool chain, all code is stored in a single repository, and everybody has access to the old code and has visibility of the code changes needed.

FEATURES

Were there any software features or tools that really impressed you?  

It's not about the features as much as the functionality. For example, when I evaluated Xamarin for a simple application, it turned out that the Android OS platform did not provide a well-built media player. In this case, Xamarin was a great option, finding that I could spin up a socket server inside of the application and allow the internal Android media player to receive data from the local socket, instead of loading data from an external source allowed me to build a reliable application with Xamarin.

Looking back, are there any areas of the software upon which you feel could be added or improved?

I don't like how Xamarin works with the iOS platform. In essence, it turns out that we need to install Xamarin tools to both the Mac device and the Windows device in order to build the application, not to mention the bugs that still show up. With iOS implementations, I tend to prefer PhoneGap. PhoneGap has their cloud service, and you just need to provide the necessary keys and additional information in order to build the iOS package. I understand that there are restrictions from Apple for building, mostly licensing rather than technical but, as you can see, Adobe PhoneGap somehow overcame these things.

OVERVIEW

We have a few quick questions and, for each question, we ask you to rate the software on a scale of one to five, with five being the best. What would you give the software for functionality of the features available?

Four.

What would you give the software for ease of use or ease of implementation into your business?

Four and a half.

For support, as in responsiveness of the team or helpfulness of the resources available?

Three and a half. I did have interactions with the support team. For our business license, they didn't have a very fast response time.

Overall, satisfaction with the platform?

Four. It's very good especially for Android applications, but it can still improve.

How likely are you to recommend the software to a colleague or similar business?

Four. Xamarin has advantages. I usually do recommend it, but as I said, it is no silver bullet, and it doesn't provide significant benefits for all types of projects.