Nothing has lead to the growth of the business world like IT. A surprising number of businesses depend on customized mobile apps and websites in their daily workflow and during the last decade the number of consumer and enterprises applications has increased drastically. Today you will find app stores flooded with numerous mobile solutions and hundreds of new products every day. With such a competition in the market, developers have to be more creative than ever before since most businesses primary goal is to transform their ideas into reality and make a profit. This is why they search for the most skilled developers to turn their business ideas into tangible business value.
We are living in the digital world where every person owns a Smartphone and almost everything can be done with a swipe of a figure. The market of Smartphones and tablets is expanding with each new day, creating room for new opportunities . As the need mobile apps continue to grow, the problem is the number of phones and operating systems that need to be supported. This has developers are looking for a way to develop apps that can run flawlessly on different platforms. Over the years Unity 3D, appecelerator titanium have been regarded as the best cross-platform SDK, but Xamarin Development outshines them all.
Xamarin development is making it easy to develop cross platform apps. It encompasses all the major l mobile platforms such as iOS, Android, Mac, C#, Windows. Xamarin platform has opened room for business expansion as enterprises can now cover a wide spectrum of people and fulfill the consumer’s needs in the shortest time possible. Xamarin covers the diversified platforms, and uses C# language, thus making it one of the best mobile development platforms in the software industry. Let’s look at some of the pros and cons of this cross-platform mobile development.
Pros
- User Experience
With Xamarin development expect a native user experience. With help of native API’s, Xamarin helps in developing excellent user experience and user interface, and also delivers high performance apps. From the user’s perspective an app development that can create apps that ‘fit’ the standard design guidelines on different platforms and doesn’t allow the using of native UI controllers, brings about the best user experience. This is something Xamarin development can guarantee.
- Shared code
Xamarin is one of the most cost efficient mobile development platforms in the market. With Xamarin, app developers can share about 75% of developed codes across all major mobile platforms such as Windows, iOS and android, this means that a developer will not have to design an app for each OS separately; therefore developers are able to deliver apps within no time.
- Supports app testing
Xamarin provides quality assurance and functionality testing on a wide range of devices, which ensures seamless integration. In fact, Xamarin supports app testing on over 2,000 devices. Developers can test an app in every given situation, hence fewer bugs and lesser headaches. Although subscribing to the ‘Test Recorder Tool” comes with a hefty price tag, it is worth the price as it helps in reporting all the bugs and other related issues.
Cons
Besides the numerous advantages, Xamarin has some drawbacks. One of the drawbacks is there aer not as many open-sourced libraries for Android and iOS development. With iOS.Xamarin and Android.Xamarin there is a higher chance you will have to reinvent the wheel as there are just a few of these libraries rewritten for Xamarin by members of its community.
Most developers prefers Xamarin because it ensures a native user experience, however, what they don’t know is that they will need unique UI code for each platform. Since the native widgets are interacted with differently.