Xamarin- The Good, The Bad and The Ugly

Mobile applications are on a rise! Hence developers prefer building native mobile applications that offer the fastest, most reliable and most responsive experience to users. But what next, business now wants to have a mobile app run across major platforms such as Android, iOS and Windows devices. Therefore we can see that there is a steep rise in cross platform mobile apps.

• Statistics released by ‘Dot Com Infoway’ showed that about 83% of developers utilized cross platforms tools. Mainly for the initiatives like development, analytics, crash reporting and testing.

Challenges for develop cross platform apps

Owing to its multi-platform functionality, reduced development time and application performance it has become the “The Choice for the developers” for building cross platform mobile applications. We can say without a doubt that cross platform will become more robust in the near future;

We are in the development of cross platform apps since 4 years and have been working on multiple platforms such as PhoneGap, Xamarin ,Sencha Touch, Monocross and Appcelerator for building Android, iOS and Windows apps.

In this blog we are sharing few insights about why Xamarin has become the most preferred choice for mobile app developers.

Xamarin – The Good

Xamarin Architecture

Xamarin architecture consists of visual design platform to develop native like applications, testing suites, native library support and a nugget style component store. Recently i OS visual design have also been provided through their IDE for helping developers from requiring opening X-Code.

LINQ can be used with collections as well as create custom delegates and events that free developers from Objective-C and Java limitations.

Here we are exploring Role of Xamarin in our Recent Project: Asset Management Application:

Manually tracking the asset information was a time consuming and tedious task for the client as the information needed to be tracked and noted each time for each asset. Therefore the client needed a system that will improve the asset management by providing an automated, systematic and accurate asset management application.

We proposed a solution to create an asset management application with an integrated RFID  based Zebra 8500 reader that could scan the RFID tags. Each asset will be marked with an RFID tag and using the Zebra 8500 reader, the information about the asset will be retrieved and written on the RFID tag.

• We developed an automated asset management application using RFID technology. To integrate the reader with the application, we used native SDK provided by the manufacturer. The application was built using Xamarin forms and the reader SDK was in Objective-C. To communicate to Objective-C from C# code, we used Sharpie tool which created intermediate definitions for Obj-C code and provided the bridge we required.
• Xamarin forms was used to achieve code reusability. We have effectively achieved almost 85% code re-usability. In spite of limited control support in Xamarin forms, we could modify the controls using custom renderers. The entire business logic was written in PCL which provided a decent level of abstraction to UI.

Conclusion

Xamarin has emerged as one of the most powerful tool for cross platform development hence is able to reach billions of smart devices irrespective of the platform. We recommend  Xamarin as it ensures flawless building of cross platform applications as it utilizes the power of C#  and provides wrapping of all native and iOS libraries. With no doubt we can say Xamarin has become the “The Choice” for the business due to its Seamless API Integration Capability, Easy Collaboration & Sharing, rapid development and Cost efficiency capabilities