Everything you Need to Know about Mobile App Development Using Xamarin
Developing similar individual native mobile app to run on Android, iOS, and Windows need considerable time and efforts. On the contrary, developing a cross-platform native mobile app using a single framework reduces these efforts significantly. Xamarin is one such platform that gives an average of 75% of shared code and reduces development time by more than 60%.
Let’s walkthrough why Xamarin scores high in developing cross-platform native mobile apps:
Xamarin is Equipped with Visual Studio Xamarin with Visual Studio builds a powerful and modern IDE. It includes various features, such as sophisticated project, project template library, and code auto completion to name a few. It provides .NET/C# framework to generate high performance real-native binary code output resulting in true native applications. With good knowledge of C# and Xamarin’s code reuse feature, it is easy to develop a cross-platform native mobile app within weeks.
Ensures Faster go-to-market with shared core logic Xamarin allows components such as data access layers, business objects and app logic to be shared across multiple platforms. That means, the core logic is written once and deployed across various platforms. Up to 90% of code is shared across the three major mobile platforms leaving the rest to be platform specific. This ensures faster go-to-market. For instance, after developing an iOS app, if the enterprise plans to develop same app to target Android users, then it can be an arduous job for developers to write the code from scratch. However, Xamarin makes this job simpler to create iOS app with ready-to-use shared code.
Lowers Learning Curve and go-live within weeks It is highly inefficient and costly to learn, develop, and maintain different codes for the same application across multiple platforms. However, Xamarin requires only C# language skills. Developers can thus avoid spending time in learning separate programming environments as single code works for multiple platforms. This diminishes the learning curve for the developers and accelerates app deployment.
Offers Xamarin Component Store Xamarin provides a ready-to-use component store. A collection of striking charts, graphs, UI controls, cloud services, beautiful themes, and various powerful features are readily available in the store. This helps the Xamarin consultants to add-on these components easily in minutes in Xamarin studio or visual studio to speed-up their mobile app development process.
Provides Secure Backend using AMS With the global partnership of Xamarin and Microsoft, .NET Portable Class Libraries are made available with deep integration with Visual Studio. These also provide support to Microsoft Azure Mobile Services on Android and iOS. With this feature, a secure and scalable backend is created for multiple mobile platforms.
Supports SDK Integration and Readiness for Future Xamarin works with the latest SDKs and utilizes some of the common and platform-specific APIs. It strongly binds APIs and SDKs of multiple platforms to generate high-quality applications. This result in Xamarin mobile apps with effective user-friendly interface. This unique SDK integration feature of Xamarin helps in providing support for new features, as soon as they are inserted in the operating system of the device.
Advocates minimal Bugs Xamarin output results in apps with fewer bugs due to its shared code technique. It becomes easy to maintain bug-free code, as the core application code is validated once for multiple platforms. Developers use Xamarin TestCloud, a mobile app testing module, which helps in testing apps with fragmentation, reports, continuous integration, and object-based UI testing. Enterprises can use Xamarin Insights, a real-time app monitor module, which helps in monitoring the performance and health of Xamarin apps.
Recently,
Xamarin Ultimate
has been made available, which bundles Xamarin Platform, TestCloud, Insights, and Xamarin University in to a single package. This provides an end-to-end solution in building, testing, and monitoring mobile applications. This can help businesses to accelerate the mobile app development life cycle.
Thousands of tech savvy enterprises and developers have adopted this next-gen technology in enterprise mobile development. A leading food services provider, based in UK, has successfully deployed a Windows phone application using Xamarin. They are now planning to deploy an android application, which functions similarly to their existing Windows app. As more than 75% of the shared code is ready-to-use in Xamarin, new android app can be easily developed and deployed. This will ensure faster go-to-market and development cycle of mobile app.