Demystifying 3 Common Myths of Xamarin.Forms For Cross Platform App Development

Over the last few years, Xamarin.Forms has become an incredibly popular cross-platform app development tool among established businesses and developers. Since its inception, Xamarin.Forms has come a long way from being a buggy, sluggish tool to becoming a preferred choice of a multi-OS framework in the app development industry.

The Early Days

In May 2014, Xamarin.Forms was launched as a stable release. It offered support for a XAML based user interface, C# back end, and access to all the native API’s to cross-platform mobile app developers. However, the major drawbacks were it was neither an open source platform nor was it widely adopted due to limited resources at Xamarin.

The Buggy Myth

Developers who started to leverage Xamarin.Forms, when it was first launched, spent most of their time in tracking and fixing the bugs in their product. It was easier to find and reproduce bugs in Xamarin.Forms which sprouted minor issues to complete app crashes. In addition, the memory leaks were way more difficult to track. It required developers to invest enormous of time and effort to stay committed to the platform. However, the bugs reduced over time. When using the latest builds and features of Xamarin.Forms, you will rarely find any bugs or regressions.

The Performance Myth

When in its nascent stage, performance was a major issue with Xamarin.Forms which included unstable ListView with minor loads and boot times. But that has significantly changed over the last few years and even more especially in the last few months. The ListView’s with cell recycling has gotten smoother and boot times are now acceptable.

Moreover, developers put a massive amount of initialization code in the user interface thread or on startup. This will cause your mobile app to load and work slow. But with the new Xamarin.Forms, the performance is much faster and better. You can easily and quickly load Xamarin.Forms animation framework to churn out seamless animations even on the low-end devices.

The Native Look & Feel Myth

As mentioned earlier, Xamarin.Forms leverage the native UI controls for each mobile platform. A number of developers and Xamarin.Forms users relate the native controls with a device’s navigation and other native gestures while considering they aren’t supported on a cross-platform mobile app. Although this is true, the major part of your app can look and feel native on each mobile platform, with the help of the same UI code. But ensure you remove the native Toolbar to create your own. With cross-platform app configuration being a difficult activity to undertake, it is recommended to enable or disable gestures on all the mobile operating systems as applicable.

Conclusion

Leveraging Xamarin.Forms through Xamarin mobile app development services bring in extensive benefits such as performance and too many bugs have become a thing of past, and new platform support added continuously such as macOS, WPF, Tizen, GTK#, and more. The platform enables developers to rapidly build and deliver rich, cross-platform user interfaces.

Apart from sharing the UI across multiple mobile operating systems, the developers can also make use of native controls on each mobile platform. In the end, developers can significantly minimize the amount of time and efforts required to retain the native UI and feel for Android, iOS, and Windows platforms. Please use the comment box below to leave your views and feedback in regards to using Xamarin.Forms for cross-platform app development for your business.