[grezql]

Xamarin Native developer here, I started off by trying to create a Pokemon Go Map app. Although I got off to a quick start, slowly it downed upon me that I started spending too much time finding fixes for Xamarin issues rather that programming. I used macbook as agent and visual studio as IDE. Sometimes the deployment would take 5 minutes! I then had to restart the agent to fix it. As a programmer I am rather a person who runs a code, change a little bit in code, then run it again. If I dont understand things I google it or find the documentation. Thats my way of learning things instead of reading through programming books.

For me Xamarin Native was slow and rigid. I highly doubt I could make 'innovative' apps with Xamarin. Maybe it is okay for people who want simple things like a "to-do app" or somethign that fetches list of images and displays it.

I wanted more and found no solution for things I needed, so I gave up and started xcode (swift + some objective c).

And let me be clear here, if I had spent same amonut of time on xcode as xamarin I would have been iOS dev master :)

Things just works much better. You can do anything you imagine with Xcode and swift. With Xamarin its more like find whatever library is out there and try to create something by combining these. Too many bugs.

This is no sly dig on Xamarin or Microsoft as I use alot of MS products myself. I have also tried phonegap, react native etc. and Xamarin is the best when it comes to cross platform without a question, but none of these can match true native coding (xcode swift/objc)

[Ryuuke]

I had exactly the same experience with Xamarin.Droid, even though I'm mainly a C# developer, for android app development, i'll go with Java & intellij Idea.

[rogihee]

I use VS2015 a lot for .Net ASP dev, but when I do Xamarin iOS dev I tend to do it in Xamarin Studio on the mac.

Much better experience, fast deploys/builds. I miss Resharper but can live without it.

[V-2]

Very recently Microsoft introduced VS for Mac (although I understand it's sort of a preview version).

I don't know about OS X, but I used Xamarin Studio on Windows and it was horrible.

[rogihee]

That is a rebranded Xamarin Studio, with a slightly updated layout to match VS.

It feels much better on mac I must say, also tried it on Windows but just weird and slow.

I'm quite happy with it, but maybe I'm biased a bit because it sucked big time and they made big improvements to it last year. It's all relative ;-).

[milkytron]

Are you saying Visual Studio feels much better on mac? If you've tried it, is there a link to download so that I can try it out myself?

[rogihee]

No Xamarin Studio on the mac vs on Windows. Logical I think because Windows has the real Visual Studio and Xamarin Studio Windows is based on GTK# (AFAIK, I think the mac UI is native Xam since last year) it is limited on the Windows side / feels quirky.

[zerr]

The only selling point for Xamarin for me is Xaramin.Forms, but so far neither this has a good reputation.

[tonypp]

As a person who's used XF for the last 2 years in my company, stay away from Xamarin.Forms. I can see some of the appeal for the regular Xamarin.iOS and .Droid but the performance of Xamarin.Forms on Android is absolutely horrible even after optimizing it to an insane amount. Think several seconds render times per page on a Nexus 5X (on a page that takes 200ms if written using Xamarin Android).

They've been denying it's a problem for over a year, and then acknowledged it a few months ago and did nothing about it.

The platform itself also harbors a lot of bizarre and difficult bugs that only cause a couple of crashes each under some very specific conditions that are nearly impossible repro consistently. But there are so many of them that on a given day, 5% of our apps will crash or freeze because of some Garbage Collector bug, a platform bug, or some platform race condition. Just check how many of the bugzilla bugs are still in the NEW state.