Likelihood to Recommend Flutter is well known for native app development, if you have android studio installed on your system, you can quickly start using it. This might not be the best choice for you if you do not wish to learn a new language, i.e. Dart and you do not know it already.
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 User interface design works great across all platforms, including native styling for iOS/macOS. Native compilation for mobile platforms and a decent rendering engine results in slick apps that can make the most of your device. Dart is a well thought out language and easy to pick up. Makes cross-platform development of good looking GUI apps a doddle. 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 Occasionally updates to the Flutter SDK result in wide-sweeping changes that seem to not be thoroughly tested and considered. Flutter sometimes evolves too fast for its own good. While the 3rd-party Flutter package ecosystem is vast and rich, 1st-party support for basic things (audio/video playback, battery information, Bluetooth services, etc.) are lacking. You are occasionally forced to rely on an open-source package for use-cases that other platforms have native support for. Documentation, particularly around testing, is lacking. While there are some great docs, like the Dart Style Guide, many Flutter-focused support documents are lacking in quality and real-world usability. Flutter allows you to architect an app however you want. While this is a great feature, it also adds complexity and leads to the current state of Flutter's state management, where there are 50+ options on how to organize your app, with very little official guidance or recommendations from the Flutter team. For a beginner, this can create decision paralysis. 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 I have experience with react and
React Native . I would say that the idea behind all those frameworks are quite similar. However, I found the javascript-based frameworks a bit more accessible as you could utilise your javascript knowledge. Here, Flutter works with its own language. This has advantages and disadvantages sometimes. I found the community around javascript frameworks bigger and therefore sometimes more helpful. However, Flutter does a good job here as well. I think the main argument for Flutter is its usability for less experienced developers. If you do not have knowledge in javascript or other programming languages then I think it is much easier to start with Flutter than with another framework like react. I think the package that you get form scratch is better than in the other frameworks were you have to set up and learn a lot more before you can start.
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 The rapid development capabilities of Flutter allow us to build apps we could not have previously considered commercially viable, opening new revenue streams. Free and open licensing made adoption very easy (ie. free/low cost!). In comparison to Qt, our time spent arguing with build tools and perfecting development environments has decreased substantially. 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