Xamarin

Writing in C#

Uses Visual Studio

Shared code base (99%)

I wish it would deploy and debug faster

The Apple connection is a bit tenuous occasionaly

The Xamarin forms updates can get really painful

Layouts that can be bind to

Great community that can provide plenty of code samples and exchanges of ideas

Provide the ability to share code between various platform such as mobile - Android, iOS, Windows, and web

Similarly to Silverlight or WinForms, if Xamarin had the ability to drag and drop in the Designer, it would be great.

The ability to auto translate some of the common native calls from different platform would also be amazing to see.

Also more help syntax auto resolving abilities is needed. I had to spend a lot of time resolving errors when importing an open source project to try out.

Allows development of cross-platform mobile applications in C# language without the need to learning new languages.

Access to Visual studio debugging tools

It's free and has a growing community

Allows use of Visual studio IDE

Occasional crashing of the application

Online community still growing. Less documentation online

Experienced problems with Code signing and deployment with IOS

Write once - use multiple places

Robust 3rd party add-ons for most functioanlity

Prompt support and assistance when needed

My only issues really stem from the IOS side, but those are not necessarily Xamarin's issues

Needing to connect to IOS machine

Code signing and deployment with IOS is very cumbersome

We save development time with Xamarin, because we use Xamarin Forms an so we can share most of the code over 3 platforms.

We can use our C# knowledge to develop iOS and Android Apps.

Xamarin's integration into Visual Studio is very good and became even better during the last releases of Visual Studio.

You still need a MacOS running on a Mac to debug and test and deploy the apps to Apple.

Built into Visual Studio

Free

Cross platform

Few examples

Native application

Code based to some extent. It is the same except specialized UI for different OS

Faster development compared to native application development.

teaching a Microsoft developers who has no experience in mobile application development is a challenge

Should be simpler for deployment to devices.

Good interactive debugger.

Built on Atom, many of the same useful functionality as the more generic editor.

Many good plugins for various other programming languages and other functionality.

Atom's multi-cursor plugin would be a welcome plugin to this IDE as well.

The online support could be further developed.

The application would occasionally crash.

Sharing code with other parts of an application, including backend and web

Not having to re-write the same application multiple times

Not having to maintain multiple versions of the same application in parallel (features, bugfixes, etc.)

Getting to use C# and all of its wonderful features for mobile development

Xamarin could provide more recognition and support to those of us who have been with them since the beginning

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.

Having also done a lot of native mobile development, some of the IDE's features need to emulator their native counterparts. For example, trying to extract a string resource on Android in Xamarin Studio is painful. There are many useful tools in Android Studio that Xamarin should implement.

Xamarin will always be behind on native platform features. They must catch up when Apple and Google release new platform versions.

The biggest pain point is the random issues Xamarin continues to have. Having a large code base on top of a native platform makes it very difficult to debug issues. Every developer must decide if its an issue with Xamarin or the native platform. Bugs don't get fixed very quickly. Hopefully that will change with the Microsoft acquisition.

Code sharing - I mean, you can do the work in half the time. Great way to release to multiple markets without having to write code twice.

Robust - Basically anything you need on the OS level is available.

Intuitive - Xamarin gives you the capability of a code share project, and then platform specific projects. You can communicate between the two and it makes it very nice to develop in.

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.

It allows us to develop apps using single codebase which runs on different platforms.

They need to work in providing quality support to customer queries