Likelihood to Recommend It is suitable for making portable applications, with almost the same code for several platforms. You can access native features of the device or use an open source plug-in from the repository to create a local database and access the internal storage of the device. It is wonderful for the construction of a native application, through the use of standard web code. It is not recommended for enterprise applications.
Read full review If you are required to develop applications that are cross-platformed, Xamarin is a great tool to use. It will help save time and effort from your development team to be able to build applications seamlessly for android, IOS, Windows, and web on a single platform instead of requiring multiple tools to get the job done.
Read full review Pros Cordova makes it very easy to develop apps for multiple platforms. The setup is very simple when it comes to creating a project, adding platforms, building and deploying apps. If you have a little mobile app development experience, all you need to know is HTML, CSS, Javascript and only a handful of cordova commands to get started with your hybrid app. Cordova provides a simple solution to access any and all of the device features through native plugins. You have a host of third-party and cordova plugins available to use device features like filesystem, camera, health kit, location services etc. You can also write your very own plugins and use them for your cordova based apps. Cordova is free to use! The only cost you will bear is the individual mobile platform developer program enrollment cost to deploy your apps to those platforms. Read full review Xamarin allows you to write cross platform code. This allows companies to build apps more quickly by writing less code. Having code abstracted and reused across multiple platforms allows for more testing and less issues overall. The ability to use Visual Studio is a huge plus. Visual Studio is one of the best IDE's available and being able to write cross platforms apps while in a great IDE makes everything less painful. Xamarin is now free with a large company backing. This means that bugs on the platform get fixed more quickly and there is a large community of developers. Read full review Cons Needs to be fully compatible with mobile machines Support for a wide variety of platforms Needs better backwards compatibility Read full review Forms - not 100% there. Still needs work but is production ready. iOS - sometimes errors can be hard to understand, if they even show up. Insights - Xamarin offers their own crash analytics software. However, it's not perfect and sometimes doesn't pick up crashes. Read full review Likelihood to Renew Xamarin has been great for developing different projects efficiently and effectively. It's nice to reuse the core business logic across different platforms so that there are less to maintain and little replications are needed. The biggest benefit is that C# programmers do not have to learn a different language to do mobile development.
Read full review Usability If you are required to develop applications that are cross-platformed, Xamarin is a great tool to use. It will help save time and efforts from your development team to be able to build applications seamlessly for android, IOS, windows, and web on a single platform instead of requiring multiple tools to get the job done
Read full review Support Rating I never had to contact support for any help. Most of the problems we ran into, we were able to identify and use peer support through blogs and other internet sources to resolve the problems. There are plenty of sources online which provide tutorials, discuss problems, etc. Example: StackOverflow
Read full review Implementation Rating Just with any programming tasks, have a plan first. Design out the system, spend time to build it correctly the first time and have plenty of testing and user acceptance opportunities. Xamarin was easy to implement for a C# programmer. However, you need to do tutorials to realize the platform's capabilities.
Read full review Alternatives Considered Apache Cordova is the mother of all other frameworks. The Ionic developed framework is well suited for development but most of their features are offered by paid services. As Apache Cordova is open source and has a license to modify it, it has no legal problems to work with it. Also, most well-known IDEs recognize the Apache Cordova snippets.
Read full review Xamarin runs natively on MacOS, and the debugger and other integration and auto-complete tools are far better than
Eclipse for C# .NET. It also carries much of the plugin/add-on capabilities that are so desirable on Atom.
Eclipse is a better for generalized software development, provided a developer is comfortable switching between the IDE the command line for certain parts of their workflow, like building, package management, or debugging. But for C# .NET development on MacOS specifically, Xamarin is the best product I've used for the job.
Read full review Return on Investment It has a positive impact in general. Cordova is really a great solution for web developers who want to bring their incredible ideas to devices, but they just do not have a lot of time to put into iOS and Android learning curves. Our biggest benefit was that the management of images for multiple devices. Developing with Cordova has drastically reduced the cost of cross-platform deployment. Read full review Saves development time and deliver fast. Allows inhouse developers build both Android and iOS application without switching languages. Allows use coding in C# in Visual studio IDE from which we can code in different languages. We don't need multiple IDEs installed Read full review ScreenShots