[jkereako]

This article hits close to home. I've been working with Xamarin for almost two years now. It has done its job and provided a quick avenue to prototype a concept and deliver a product. However, as the article mentions, the maintenance is a bear. Here are some of the issues I face:

- The developer experience is awful. Visual Studio for Mac causes so many issues (crashes, mangled project files) it hinders productivity. About once every two weeks I spend half a day wrestling with a VS issue.

- As AirBnB's article mentioned, to be effective in cross-platform development, you need to know three platforms well which is a difficult task.

- Xamarin's performance on Android has notoriously been poor and only has marginally improved. Try using a Xamarin app on a cheaper Android device or an older version of Android.

- No mobile engineers want to work on Xamarin.

That said, the good news about working with Xamarin is that it exposed me to C# and the .NET ecosystem. I'm truly impressed with these technologies.

EDIT

I forgot to mention that I think the complexity of an app ought to determine whether a cross-platform technology is a good idea. Xamarin is a great solution for prototypes and simple apps.

[king_magic]

I’ve come to almost exactly the same conclusions. And it really is sad: Xamarin developer tools used to be decent, almost even good.

Today? I’d rather try to build mobile apps in COBOL than Xamarin. The developer tools are so broken, so buggy, and so poorly documented that it’s just not worth it.

I thought Microsoft purchasing Xamarin would have made things better at the lowest level of the dev tools stack - hey, finally some investment will go toward shoring up the dev stack! Nope, apparently not.

Years later, trying to connect VS for Windows to a Mac build server is still astoundingly, soul-crushingly broken. No way to get support. No straightforward way to file bugs.

Just a truly awful developer experience.