With the rapid growth of the mobile market, it’s crucial for businesses to maintain a presence across all platforms without wasting unnecessary resources and funds. According to Statista, the global number of smartphone users is expected to grow by 1.8 billion between 2024 and 2029, with Android (71%) and iOS (27%) dominating over 98% of the market. This makes cross-platform development extremely important for businesses looking to maintain a competitive advantage in the marketplace.
Among the many frameworks available today, Xamarin continues to stand out due to its powerful benefits. And in this article, we’ll explore what makes Xamarin such a strong rival for both current and future cross-platform mobile development.
What is Xamarin?
Let’s start with the “what is Xamarin” question. Xamarin is an open-source platform developed by Microsoft in 2011. It was created to build iOS, Android, and Windows applications using C# and .NET. With it, developers can share up to 90% of their code across platforms, reducing development time and costs while maintaining native performance and UI.
Xamarin provides access to native APIs and SDKs for each platform, allowing apps to use platform-specific features and deliver a seamless, native look and feel. It also integrates with Visual Studio, offering a unified development environment and strong support from Microsoft’s ecosystem. In 2024, Xamarin.Forms was made as a part of .NET MAUI to extend cross-platform support to desktops (Windows, macOS).
For businesses aiming to speed up development and cut costs without sacrificing quality and performance, partnering with experienced Xamarin cross platform app development vendors is key. One such provider is SoftTeco, which offers Xamarin app development services that meet the unique needs of each client – whether it’s migration to Xamarin or app optimization.
Reasons to Choose Xamarin for Cross-Platform App Development
Now let’s consider 7 key reasons to choose Xamarin for cross-platform app development, exploring its technical strengths:
Fast Development
As we said above, Xamarin greatly speeds up the development process by allowing developers to write code once and reuse it across multiple platforms. This significantly reduces duplication of effort and allows for creating reusable components and libraries that can be used across multiple projects.
With integration in Visual Studio, developers gain access to a powerful set of tools. Tools, such as IntelliSense (code completion), integrated debugging, and more, streamline development workflows and boost productivity. Also, Xamarin provides access to a rich collection of cross-platform libraries and plugins, reducing the need to build functionalities from scratch.
Strong Microsoft Support
Another compelling reason to choose Xamarin is its robust support from Microsoft. Since acquiring Xamarin in 2016, Microsoft has integrated it into the .NET ecosystem by providing developers with a robust set of tools and resources. Now, Xamarin integrates well with development tools (Visual Studio), a versatile programming language (.NET and C#), cloud services (Azure), and enterprise-grade support.
Through the integration with Visual Studio, developers have access to a suite of tools for coding, debugging, UI design, testing, and deployment. Also, developers take advantage of the versatility of .NET and C#. This makes the development process more efficient and scalable.
With Azure services, developers can easily integrate cloud-based features, such as authentication or database storage, thus reducing backend complexity. As Microsoft continues to push the evolution of Xamarin.Forms via .NET MAUI, cross-platform development becomes better. Xamarin developers will have an easier time switching over and will enjoy better performance and features.
Thus, Xamarin significantly benefits from Microsoft, leading to accelerated development and reduced costs. This makes it a preferred choice for cross-platform app development, especially for organizations that are already invested in Microsoft technologies.
Robust Testing
Xamarin allows developers to write automated tests using tools like Xamarin.UITest. It integrates with popular testing frameworks, such as NUnit, and supports test-driven development (TDD) practices. This helps developers catch bugs early on during development.
With Xamarin Test Cloud, or modern BrowserStack App Automate, AWS Device Farm, and Sauce Labs, developers can run automated tests on a broad range of real devices in the cloud. This ensures that an app performs consistently across different screen sizes, OS versions, and device models. Thus, Xamarin helps engineers develop reliable, high-quality applications with confidence.
Excellent Security
Xamarin helps developers build secure mobile apps by combining native platform security, Microsoft enterprise tools, and advanced code protection techniques. Let’s explore each in depth.
First, Xamarin supports built-in native security features for iOS and Android, such as secure storage and biometric authentication. This ensures that each application adheres to the data protection best practices used by the core platform.
Second, Xamarin integrates well with Microsoft services, including Azure Active Directory, Microsoft Intune, and secure cloud APIs. It allows developers to implement enterprise-level authentication, authorization, and data encryption. So, Xamarin is a great choice for businesses that must meet strict security rules.
Lastly, Xamarin supports advanced code protection techniques, like obfuscation, preventing hackers from accessing code. In this way, Xamarin combines the benefits of native-level protection with the efficiency of cross-platform development, making security as strong as possible.
Native User Experience
Xamarin stands out for delivering a native user experience across iOS, Android, and Windows. It enables developers to build the user interface using native UI toolkits of each platform – UIKit for iOS, Android SDK for Android, and UWP for Windows. So apps look and feel like native ones. For this, developers can choose between two development options:
- Xamarin Native (Xamarin.iOS and Xamarin.Android): approach where UI and logic development is done separately for each platform, using their native UI elements. It’s used for creating a unique design for one platform.
- Xamarin.Forms: it is a framework that allows you to create a unified user interface that will automatically adapt to iOS, Android and other platforms.
Choosing Xamarin means you don’t have to sacrifice user experience for cross-platform efficiency. Instead, you can build a high-quality, performant app with a truly native user experience on multiple platforms.
Near-Native Performance
Unlike hybrid frameworks that rely on webviews or interpreted environments, Xamarin is compiled into native code for iOS, Android, and Windows. This allows Xamarin apps to access native APIs directly and run with performance that is close to native apps.
To achieve this, Xamarin uses Ahead-of-Time (AOT) compilation on iOS and primarily Just-In-Time (JIT) or mixed-mode compilation on Android, converting C# into native machine code. It minimizes overhead and improves execution speed.
Also, Xamarin provides access to native UI controls and platform-specific APIs, which enables smooth animations, fast load times, and efficient hardware utilization. While Xamarin apps may have slightly larger sizes and higher memory usage than pure native apps, their performance is still sufficient even for applications with rich interfaces.
Thus, Xamarin delivers near-native performance by combining native compilation and UI rendering with a shared codebase. It’s a great option for teams seeking a balance between development efficiency and app speed across platforms.
Easy Maintenance
As we’ve already said, Xamarin streamlines maintenance by allowing developers to use a shared codebase for multiple platforms. In other words, when you need to fix bugs, update features, or make improvements with Xamarin, you only need to make changes in one place, and those updates are automatically reflected across all supported platforms.
Such an approach saves time and effort, unlike native development, where updates need to be made and tested separately for each platform. It also makes the app easier and cheaper to maintain over time.
Large Community and Support
Xamarin has a large, vibrant ecosystem of developers around the globe. Whether you’re a beginner or an experienced developer, you’ll find a wealth of resources, tools, and support, including open-source libraries, tutorials, GitHub repositories, and forums (Stack Overflow).
Also, Microsoft’s support means that Xamarin has strong documentation, regular updates, and deep integration with other Microsoft tools like Visual Studio and Azure. It reduces development time by offering out-of-the-box solutions. Developers can quickly find answers, resources, tutorials, and troubleshooting help for almost any issue they encounter.
Conclusion
Xamarin remains a leading choice for cross-platform development due to its high performance, native-like experience, and shared codebase. Its strong integration with Microsoft tools, support for multiple platforms, and a large development community make it a reliable framework for both small startups and large enterprises.
If you’re wondering “is Xamarin good for app development?”, the answer is yes. While .NET MAUI is replacing Xamarin.Forms (in some cases), the core principles of Xamarin continue to be vital and will play a key role in cross-platform development in 2025 and beyond.
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