Xamarin as the best choice for cross-platform Mobile App development
Everybody is switching over to mobile apps from the traditional websites as mobile apps are easy to use and can be downloaded quickly from the app store. To go through a website you need to search inside several pages and ultimately you waste a lot of time waiting. However, mobile apps offers ease of search, saves time and allows you to perform your tasks as expected. Developing a mobile app is not easy, as it seems; hence, companies today are relying more on Xamarin for cross-platform mobile app development. With global market share of various mobile platforms, cross-platform mobile app development has become crucial for modern businesses. When compared to native mobile apps, cross-platform mobile applications can be developed quickly and in a more cost-effective way.
Xamarin allows developers to write the app in C#, and share the same code across multiple mobile platforms including Android, iOS, and Windows. App developers can share about 75% of developed code across major mobile platforms, instead of designing an app for each system independently. This reduces the cost and time-to-market. With seamless integration, Xamarin provides functionality testing and quality assurance on various devices.
Reasons for choosing Xamarin
1. A complete Native package
Complied with native code Xamarin applications always run natively with the help of UI controls. As Xamarin has the capability of combining APIs and UI controls using Xamarin.iOS, Xamarin.Android, and Xamarin.Mac. Thus, you can easily interact with most of the original platform API. Xamarin allows you to create libraries, which are written on native technologies like Objective C, Java, or C/C++, thus reducing development time as you can reuse the already written code on these technologies in your application.
2. Key IDE Enhancements
Remarkable Visual Update:
Visual Studio (For MAC and Windows) consists of a new welcome screen, several new icons, smooth gestures and touches and ad hoc support for Retina displays.
Managed Visual Studio Support:
In a lone Visual Studio extension, you will get enhanced iOS and Android extension. You will get well-organized installation and updates for all users and thus, you can improve the build and debugging experience.
NuGet:
User gets absolute support for using NuGet packages in mobile apps, which are offered by Xamarin cross-platform. In addition, in the Visual Studio for Mac or Windows, you can take benefit of many NuGet packages.
NET BCL Documentation:
Visual Studio offers entire documentation for .NET Base Class Libraries.
3. Advantages of Code Sharing
Xamarin offers some code sharing techniques for cross-platform apps:
Shared Projects:
Developers can now use Shared Project, which is a simple approach for sharing code across platform like iOS, Windows, and Android.
Portable Class Libraries:
PCL and suitable application architecture allows Xamarin to share code across all mobile platforms.
4. Benefits of using C#
The developers can use C# with Xamarin to complete all tasks that can be performed using Java and Objective-C. C# can be learnt easily, is comprehensive, flexible, general-purpose, and type-safe pure object-oriented programming language for all. C# allows simple data types to be considered as objects therefore, reduces heaps of coding efforts. C# displays a systematic program behavior with type-safety properties to avert type errors. Moreover, C# removes the use of pointers and headers as well as namespace and reference operators are replaced by a period. It also allows making of asynchronous programming breeze along with ASP.NET framework. Conclusively, C# is better programming language against other cross-platform technologies.
5. Time-to-Market, Development, and Maintenance Downtime
Xamarin allows you to code once and then share the application logic across all mobile operating systems. Creating a cross-platform app using Xamarin reduces the need for a separate application for various mobile operating systems. As Xamarin eliminates the repetitiveness procedure it inturn reduces the time spent on software development. Additionally, maintenance of the application takes less time since the team needs to fix issues in only one application. Therefore, Xamarin eases development time and a single team can troubleshoot app performance issues after deployment and release.
6. Supports Multiple Devices
Along with major mobile platforms, Xamarin also supports smart phones, tablets, and wearable devices. As the platform supports the latest mobile devices, it becomes easier for programmers to create innovative mobile apps. For example, as Xamarin supports Google Glass devices; the developers can create apps for the devices by combining Xamarin Studio, and Android SDK and GDK.
7. Allows performance monitoring and facilitates testing
The developers can use Xamarin Insight to monitor and improve the application’s performance by tracking exceptions and crashes. The tool can be used to rank the issues based on user impact and reach. Therefore, they can handle the issues according to their priority without interpreting a huge amount of data. Usually, the developers need to invest a lot of time and effort to assess the mobile app’s look, feel, and performance across multiple devices. However, with the help of Xamarin Test Suite they can now automatically test the mobile app on 1,000 real devices in the cloud. In addition, they have an option to write custom test suites, upload them, and run the test cases on a variety of real mobile devices on cloud.
About Raybiztech
Raybiztech is a leading Global Information Technology (IT) Services and Solutions, a CMMI Level 3, ISO 27001:2013 Certified Company. We are a Member of NASSCOM, HYSEA, NJTC, and AIIA. Raybiztech offers comprehensive end-to-end IT Services for Business Application Development, Enterprise Solutions, Enterprise Collaboration Services, Testing and Quality Assurance Services, Cloud Computing and IT Infrastructure Management to organizations in the Banking & Finance, Insurance, Healthcare, Manufacturing, Retail, Media & Entertainment, Leisure & Travel, Telecom and Energy & Utilities verticals as well as Independent Software Vendors.
