Lets be honest! The last 10 days have put everything on it’s head in the mobile dev. world.
Here is why,
- Microsoft acquired Xamarin
- They already showed some amazing improvements to Xamarin at Build
- Xamarin included at no extra charge in Visual Studio – in all editions, including community. This effectively takes one of two biggest downside of Xamarin away. The second downside being a more complex dev story – which with Microsoft’s backing will be smoothed out I am sure.
- MSDN subscribers will get Xamarin studio on mac. And there is a free Xamarin studio community edition on Mac. I know Xamarin studio is no Visual studio, but you should compare it with XCode :)
- Xamarin core platform will be open source and in .NET foundation.
- Mono will be under MIT license – which means you will see it for Arm64 CPUs, like iOS. I am predicting writing C# for iOS.
- Xamarin allows you to target multiple platforms, and Xamarin test cloud allows you to test on multiple devices.
What does this mean?
- This is the beginning of the end of all other native dev approaches, such as reactnative, fuse, nativescript, etc.
- It seriously challenges Java/ObjectiveC/Swift. The only reason to continue with those is – INERTIA.
- While this challenges Cordova, Phonegap, ionic, for various reasons I feel that will still be an alternative we will have and will survive.
TL;DR; - Cordova + Xamarin will rule the future. Exciting, but don’t underestimate the complexity of writing and managing all this.