Mobile Dev Tool
Xamarin

Xamarin is a free, Cross-Platform, and Open source app platform for building Android, iOS and Windows apps with .NET and C#.

Developers and Release Date

Xamarin was developed my Microsoft and was released in May 2011. The current version (of Xamarin.Forms) is Xamarin.Forms 5.0.

Development Type and Platform

Xamarin allows you to develop cross-platform applications for iOS, macOs, tvOS, watchOS Android and Univeral Windows Platform. This allows you to have one codebase for every platform, and Xamarin will take care of integrating the native APIs for each supported platform. You can then add code for specific native features of each platform after developing a base.

Pricing and Licensing

Being open source, Xamarin is completely free and comes with absolutely no licensing costs.

Features

  • Native Platofrm Integration for Android and iOS
  • Visual Studio Integration
  • Diagnostic Tools
  • Custom Controls
  • Debugging

Debugging and Emulators

Visual Studio includes an Android Emulator as part of the Mobile Development with .NET workload. You can even debug from a physical android device.
For debugging with iOS, the same workload also includes the Mono Soft debugger.

Hardware and Software Requirements

The following are required to develop apps using Xamarin:

  • Visual Studio
  • Windows 7 or higher / macOS Mojave (10.14) or higher
  • Revelant platform SDK (e.g. iOS 12 SDK Android 6.0)
  • System Requirements matches that of the SDK you are developing for.

Advantages of Xamarin

  • Framework embedded in Visual Studio
  • Shared App Logic for all supported platforms
  • Free and Open Source
  • Incredible Components for Creating User Interfaces

Disadvantages of Xamarin

  • There is a large app overhead because Xamarin is cross-platform. This may make it require more storage space and resources than native applications
  • Smaller Community than most other mobile development platforms
  • Some manual coding may be required as it is not always perfect when integrating for every platform

Market Share

According to Simform.com, Xamarin apps have a 1.74% market share.
According to Instabug.com, there are over 1.4 million Xamarin developers worldwide. You can also find some good apps made with Xamarin on that website.