#hybridmobileapplication

Having a smart and robust mobile strategy has become imperative for business striving for online success. An increasing number of users access internet via their smartphones and this is the reason why the majority of businesses are adapting mobile-first approach to cater to the huge number of smartphone users. When it comes to going mobile, businesses prefer to create a solution compatible with several platforms, specifically Android and iOS. This is why Cross-Platform or hybrid mobile app development is taking forefront in the world of mobile apps.

This article is going to tell you in detail about developing cross-functional applications with Xamarin.

 What is Xamarin?

Xamarin had started its journey as product of Mono project but later in 2016, Microsoft acquired it and integrated into the .NET platform.

Currently, Xamarin is considered to be one of the most popular open-source platforms for developing cross-functional apps. A single stack of Xamarin, C# and .Net allows developers to reuse the code up to 95% so that they can quickly develop a mobile application for Android, iOS and Windows operating system.

Now, you might be wondering to know how good Xamarin is. Well, the official statistics published by the company show that more than 15,000 organizations and 1.4 million developers were using them in 2017. Judging by statistics, Xamarin and its products are highly popular among the mobile application developers. Some of the well known customers of Xamarin are Bosch, Siemens, Slack, Pinterest and others. Several industry leaders have been using this open-source mobile application building platform for last few years and this particular fact proves Xamarin’s efficiency and reliability.

 Xamarin’s Unique Features:

Cross-platform application development or hybrid application development is growing in popularity as it has some key advantages over native application development.

It’s a perfect application development tool that enables developers to build the code once and run it across different platforms without compromising the app’s performance, usability, maintainability and user experience.

Xamarin allows developers to create single application logic using C# and .NET for all the three mobile application platforms at a time.

 Advantages of building hybrid application with Xamarin:

1. Native user experience:

Xamarin enables developers to have the complete access to native APIs and toolkits used on Android, iOS and Windows platforms. Using Xamarin developers can give the native design and performance to any application.

The platform-oriented elements and technologies available in C# and Visual Studio allow Xamarin to provide a native-like environment.

 2. All-in-one Technology Stack:

One of the key advantages of using Xamarin for cross-platform application development is it that C# provides the all kinds of solutions. Developers can easily do everything in Visual Studio without shifting between different types of environments. It makes the application development cycle highly convenient and less time-consuming for the developers as they can create application using a single language. This is also the same reason why Xamarin is easy to learn.

 3. Highly sharable code:

Xamarin enables application developers to follow a “write once and use everywhere” approach. Using Xamarin developers can build 60%-95% reusable code. The single codebase can seamlessly run on different platforms and performs like a native application. The codebase may require some minor changes only.

 4. Easy Maintenance:

The application maintenance team can easily maintain the applications developed with Xamarin. Forms as they share code. When it comes to updating the applications and fixing any issue, the developers just need to make the changes in the source code and changes will be automatically applied to other solutions.

 5. Easy but Comprehensive Testing:

Xamarin platform comes with Xamarin Test Cloud and Xamarin Test Recorder which make the application performance monitoring and UI testing job a cake-walk. Developers can use these tools to run automated tests on multiple devices in the cloud environment and find all the performance related issue.