Choosing a framework for mobile app development is one of the greatest challenges that a business owner or product owner could potentially encounter. If you are planning to build a mobile app for your business, you need to have a clear understanding about certain parameters that directly or indirectly affects the performance of your apps. This includes the type of app being developed,
business rules, platform compatibility and its GUI. Based on the features that you are going to incorporate in your mobile app, selecting a cross-platform or hybrid framework can be a huge advantage because of the fact that it can save a great amount of development time and resources without compromising your mobile apps usability, looks and performance.
Xamarin is a cross-platform app development toolkit that was First released in 2011. This framework allows you to build native apps that can work on iOS, Android, as well as Windows platforms using a single C# codebase. Moreover, Xamarin is backed by the tech giant Microsoft. This guarantees you continuous developer support and framework stability.
Mobile app development on Xamarin is pretty much easy as it uses a single codebase that can be shared across multiple platforms. With this mobile app development framework, you can build mobile apps that can perform similar to that of a native app. Xamarin accomplishes this by making use of native technologies.
Let’s dive deeper into some of the pros of using this framework and see what makes up this framework ’s unique strengths:
Shared Codebase:
Xamarin gives you the added advantage to work with a single app and deploy that app out to many platforms. This is because Xamarin allows you to reuse upto 95% of code with native performance across iOS, Android, both, or other platforms. Because of this reason you only need to hire only a single team of Xamarin developers rather than multiple teams of iOS developers working in objective-c or Android developers working in Java. If you are on a tight budget and need to hire Xamarin app developers with lower hourly rates, it is better to hire Xamarin app developers in India or outsource your mobile app development project to an Offshore Software Development Company.
Along with that, Xamarin provides great user experience. The framework accomplishes this by using specific UI elements for both platforms to deliver seamless user experience.
DevOps Support:
Xamarin got excellent support for DevOps. One of the greatest features of Xamarin is the pipeline integration that enables mobile app developers to build and compile their app and use DevOps pipelines for continuous deployment and continuous integration. Pipelines also allow developers to push their code automatically to the testing team or users. This comes out as a a great feature especially if you’re using agile in your organization
Open Source:
As we mentioned above, Xamarin is open source. Being an open source framework, Xamarin is free to use which means you can download the source code , modify it, change it or you can contribute to it if you want to help improve the product and the developer community. Moreover,Microsoft has included Xamarin now in the visual studio community edition.
Easy Maintenance:
Maintaining or updating a mobile app can be a hard task when you have more than one platform involved. As Xamarin is cross-platform, updating or maintaining apps that are written in Xamarin is pretty much an easy task. Developers only need to do the changes in the source file, and it will automatically be propagated to both platforms. This significantly minimizes the time needed to debug, maintain, or make changes to the code when necessary. On top of that, you can get real time insights about your mobile app (user activity, active devices, crash history, etc) with Visual Studio App Center that comes with Xamarin.
Suitable for building Minimum Viable Products :
Using Xamarin for your mobile app development project is considered as a good option if you want to develop an MVP that has cross-platform capabilities. Xamarin allows your development teams to rapidly develop an MVP without spending more on your development.
Freeing from Hardware Compatibility issues
Xamarin allows the use of plug-ins and supported APIs for cross-platform application development, meaning you are going to enjoy native level interaction with the operating device hardware. This shows that you have no hardware compatibility problems with the Xamarin mobile application development services. When developing applications on the Xamarin platform, it is essential to understand the point that any Xamarin application development company can develop commonly available device-enabled applications that work seamlessly on a diversity of platforms. Further, Xamarin provides you the freedom to bond native libraries to craft the best applications for the most excellent quality customizations.
Supports Rapid Mobile App Development:
Xamarin is one of the few frameworks that support Rapid Mobile App Development (RMAD). You must be now wondering what RMAD is all about! Rapid Mobile App Development (RMAD) is an approach aimed for developing higher-quality mobile apps within a relatively less amount of time. When compared to traditional app development, Rapid Mobile App Development uses code-free programming tools, early prototyping, etc. RMAD is targeted mainly for subject matter experts who don’t necessarily have good technical knowledge and coding skills.
With all the cool benefits that this framework offers, Xamarin is undeniably the best mobile app development framework that you can choose for your next cross platform mobile app development project. With Microsoft’s strong support and periodic updates, as well as an expanding developer community, the future of this framework looks bright.