Some Pros and Cons One Should Know of iOS App Development with Xamarin

Plagirism: Xamarin is a new platform that allows developers to create cross-platform apps over multiple operating systems such as native iOS, Android, and Windows Phone apps. It is not a "Write Once - Run Anywhere" platform; rather it simply shares code across platforms in the C# language. Xamarin certified developer are of high performing platform and offers a wide range of customization options for developers to create native user interfaces. An estimated 1 million developers are currently using Xamarin for developing iOS apps. But what benefits does Xamarin bring in? Are there any disadvantages as well? We have put together a brief synopsis of the various pros and cons of Xamarin while developing iOS apps, based on the experiences of iOS developers who have extensively made use of this platform. The Pros Unique Uniformity C# is one the best languages for mobile app development as it can be used to code across all platforms. A consolidated code written in C# enables a large team to work better. Business logic that is written once becomes easy to share. Robust Performance Xamarin is a robust and powerful platform. It has much better performance when compared to Native and is much faster than other cross-platform development tools like PhoneGap. Easy Customization Xamarin uses native UI components from each platform and allows you to simulate the look and feel of a native iOS App. Extensive Support Xamarin supports most hardware features such as cameras, accelerometers, and GPS. Stability issues are easily fixed by frequent updates released by the Xamarin team. For further support, developers can refer to the Xamarin forum, a decent sized community that provides quick resources for developers when they have questions or issues. Compact Coding Coding for iOS apps can be done on modern IDEs such as Xamarin Studio IDE or Microsoft's Visual Studio IDE. These IDEs include features such as code auto-completion, a comprehensive project template library, an integrated source control, Project and Solution management system and more. Developers simply need to put together everything, do a bit of testing and finally submit to App Store. Less work and productive output, that's what Xamarin is all about. Fast and Easy-to-Integrate UI Design - Xamarin has built a designer for the iOS storyboard that integrates with Xamarin Studio. This allows developers to maintain compatibility with the storyboard so that it is easy to edit in Xcode or Xamarin Studio. Xamarin.iOS exposes all the native user interface objects provided by Apple. They are easily added to Xamarin.iOS applications using the iOS Designer, Xcode's Interface Builder or programmatically. You can also take great advantage of MonoTouch.Dialog (MT.D) toolkit to define a complex applicatio UI easily and faster with a declarative approach. The Cons A Little Expensive Xamarin does not come cheap. It costs $1000 per developer, per device platform. App Overhead Xamarin based apps have built-in overhead which means they have a larger footprint. This can largely affect the download time and the amount of storage space a Xamarin app uses on your devices. Generic Support is Limited Unlike the Mon/.NET, code on iOS is compiled statically and ahead of time rather than being compiled by a JIT compiler. Mono's AOT technology comes with certain generic restrictions and you can recognize them at the time of compilation. This is not a problem for the regular .NET or Mono runtime as we use JIT compilers, but for static compiler like Xamarin.iOS, it is an issue. No Code Sharing Outside Xamarin Code written by a team of developers with Xamarin and C# cannot be shared with the developers or teams who use only Objective-C, Swift or Java. However, you can import and tie up Objective-C and Java with C# in Xamarin. Lack of Community Support Xamarin is a relatively new cross-platform so they have fewer resources. Hence, if the developers hit a roadblock, it is quite difficult for them to find a solution online. In such cases the team has to figure out solutions to the problems through their own effort, thus increasing development time. Therefore, it is better to hire a xamarin certified developer as they have access to support resources, through their partner programs.