What Is Xamarin?
Xamarin is a development platform that lets you write cross-platform, but native, iOS, Android, and Windows Phone apps in C #and.NET.
Xamarin includes the Native Android and iOS APIs with C #bindings. This provides you the ability to use any of the native user interface, notifications, images, animations, and other features of the Android and iOS phone— everything using C#.
Each new release of Android and iOS can be paired with Xamarin, with a new release that includes bindings for their new APIs.
Xamarin’s.NET port provides functionality such as data types, generics, delegates, language-integrated query (LINQ), sequential programming patterns, garbage collection with a subset of Windows Communication Foundation (WCF). Libraries are operated with a linger to have only those components that are referenced.
To understand what makes Xamarin so prominent, and why a business should opt for it rather than separately developing native mobile applications, let’s take a closer look at the notable features and key business benefits of Xamarin.
Xamarin is a development platform that helps you create 60-95% of reusable code. That is why it is often referred to as “write once, use everywhere”. A single codebase can run on a number of native performance platforms, which may require minimal changes only.
One of Xamarin’s smartest features is that it isn’t attempting to impose commonality where there’s none. Android and iOS each have UI and SDK features that are distinct from the look and feel of each platform. Such features are central to iOS apps that feel like iOS and Android apps feeling like Android.
Some cross-platform application development tools attempt to conceal the uniqueness of the platform which results in apps feeling unfamiliar to the platform they are running on. Xamarin is doing exactly the same. Xamarin focuses on the unique features of each platform.
Besides the standard.NET classes, Xamarin offersiOS-specific.NET classes and Android-specific.NET classes, each of which exposes their respective platform’s specific functionality. Incorporating the core. .NET classes with the platform-specific classes allows applications to share core logic in both iOS and Android, thus taking advantage of the unique features of each platform.
When developing a cross-platform solution, you don’t have to compromise user experience, since Xamarin offers the look-and-feel equivalent to native applications.
The use of platform-specific elements and technologies accessible in C #and Visual Studio makes the nativity possible:
Because everything is written in C# and within the.NET framework, different teams are not required for working on the app. Development expenses and maintenance costs are minimized with a single team. It is especially useful for companies with limited human and hardware resources.
In addition, the development, testing and deployment processes are substantially simplified when performed by a single team and using a single technological stack which also provides minimal market time.
Xamarin assures reliability, continuous technological assistance and fast problem solving as it is supported by Microsoft— one of the leading global tech software companies.
Moreover, on the official Microsoft Learn platform, Microsoft offers access to robust educational opportunities, including self-paced Xamarin courses and extensive tech documents. Developers are therefore not working in a vacuum and can get support while developing their skills.
The primary reason Xamarin tends to cause fewer bugs is the same reason that it offers quicker time-to-market: less code is written. The less code we write, the fewer bugs are expected.
Xamarin also eliminates errors by giving the possibility of wider test coverage. Any provided project has a finite amount of test time. We will write a single, more detailed series of tests that verify the code on all systems rather than wasting more time writing two sets of essentially redundant tests.
It also has the capability to minimize bugs by providing the opportunity for greater test coverage. Any given project has a defined or limited amount of time given for testing. Instead of spending that time writing two sets of largely duplicated tests, we can write a single, more detailed set of tests validating the code on both platforms.
With Xamarin the whole team will focus solely on working with. NET / C#. This enables the skills of each team member to develop more thoroughly and allows the team as a whole to properly support and inspect one another.
By using Xamarin to build our iOS / Android applications, we’re able to get our apps ready to support Windows Phone without spending a single second in Windows Phone development. All the shared logic that we create for our iOS / Android app will be completely embraced by Windows Phone as long as we show that we want that to be the case when we first create the project.
It allows us to build our app without pouring any effort into Windows Phone development. Nevertheless, should a Windows Phone opportunity arise, all we have to do is build the Windows Phone UI, and instead of just two, our app now supports three smartphone platforms.