[maxxxxx]

I have never heard anything positive about Xamarin.Forms from people who have used it. Has this improved?

[tluyben2]

It has improved. It works well for a lot of use cases. And if you want to have a platform more focused you just make custom renderers for those elements. It is not for everything but especially if it will support more platforms it will be very interesting for LoB apps.

[king_magic]

I use it a fair bit, mostly for enterprise apps. It definitely has its quirks but overall it's come a long way.

All depends on how polished your UI needs to be. Anything too polished and you're better off going straight Xamarin or pure native.

[kevindqc]

I've never used Xamarin, but I'm curious what their complaints are?

[devopsproject]

To be clear: "Xamarin.forms" is different than "Xamarin" and the following is based on my experience with "Xamarin.forms".

Also note that my experience with this is building an extremely simple business-y app for internal users.

1. Its moving fast so documentation is lacking and the "right" way to do something, posted 6 months ago, is wrong\deprecated\wonky

2. The tooling leaves a lot to be desired. Although this has greatly improved, there are still tons of steps to publish (https://developer.xamarin.com/guides/android/deployment,_tes...).

3. Updates constantly breaking things. To be fair, this is also improving

4. There may still be instances where you have to drop into native code or split code based on platform. This means you sometimes will need to know: c#, xamarin.forms oddities, java\android stuff AND objective c\iOS. This may not be an issue for simple apps

5. UI builder is limited. The apps will be native looking but you won't be winning any design awards. Some things also seem impossible so it helps if the customer\designer\stakeholder is really flexible. If someone asks for an app to collect and display data, you will probably be ok. If they give you pixel dimensions and other minutiae run.