It amazes me that the constant complaint on here is the price. Seriously folks, if you are a professional developer (by that I mean your primary ability to earn money for you and your family is the development of software) then the cost of a Xamarin license should be looked at as a factor of time.
How much time will it save you? Lets imagine your current project to build an iOS and Android app of identical functionality you are estimating at 6 weeks for each platform. 12 total weeks. Lets say that Xamarin tech gives you a 10% boost (it will be much higher but lets be conservative), that means over the 60 business days, you get back 6. Assume you have 8 hours of work per day and you just bought 48 hours of your time. The basic license which does nearly everything most people need is the Indie license and $300 per platform. Six hundred dollars to buy 48 hours of your time back means the purchase is viable if you value your time at more than 12.50 per hour.
If you value your time less than that, you have bigger problems than which mobile tooling to use.
The truth is the productivity factor is much higher than 10% and the license is good for a year, pick up a couple other projects like this through the year and that number collapses. For me this year I will probably do 4 cross plat projects with Xamarin and my productivity diff is north of 50%. The purchase is a no brainer.
It amazes me that you've completely missed out on some of the reasons for people complaining about the cost. My comment is one you're railing against and I think you're off base. Even going by your factor of time, I have to bet $1,000 that this product will be worth both that money and the time that I have to put into learning and dealing with it. There's no VS trail (as far as I know). So other than going off of blog posts and advice, I have to pay at least $300 and then learn both the tool and it's IDE or gamble an extra $700 that it will be useful in an IDE/environment I'm already familiar with.
Being honest, there will be very little learning curve going from VS to Xamarin Studio. They tried to make that switch as painless as possible.
You are right, there is a factor of learning that needs to be baked into your consideration but there comes a point where you put a little trust in people who came before you and tell you 'I have done this, I have been where you are - follow me and you will be fine'.
On the flip side, Nat Friedman is incredibly approachable. I am sure if you simply email him and tell him your concerns he will accommodate you with a longer trial period or some kind of money back guarantee, that just how he is.
Great, now I feel like my reply was way too snarky. I'll give the XS IDE a try and I want to be clear to any Xamarin/dev folks reading here, I in no way think all this stuff should be free. I just see that as a limiting barrier and, judging by the comments here and elsewhere, so do others. I appreciate your reply and insight, thanks!
Even purchasing a business license (allowing you to use visual studio) for two platforms would still be cost effective at $1998 per year. Given that you're developing one code base instead of two, I'd guess the productivity increase would be at least 50%.
Here's the problem: it's too expensive to learn on my own, and I can't advocate for C#, F# or Mono without already being an expert. Yes, I am a professional software engineer, and I support my family that way. But I have other expenses and interests, too, and blowing money on a compiler/IDE/platform just so I can play with it in my spare time doesn't really work for me.
Think of it another way: how do you plan to grow the next generation of engineers if they can't afford your technology to learn on, but they can download a JDK and a good Scala IDE for free?
Moreover, I'm not sure how you're arriving at a 10% productivity gain without knowing what I'm already working on. It may be 10% compared to Objective C for iOS, but is it 10% for my server-side Scala project?
30 days. 100% Risk Free, Unconditional money back guarantee.
Lets just get expense out of the way because that argument is actually invalid. For professional devs like us, if you cannot learn something new enough to make a decision on it - in 30 days, then we have bigger problems than license fees.
If that is the case for you then money is not the issue, it is time. Having 30 free days for me to spend learning a tech is a unicorn, it does not exist.
I understand your frustration because there are so many amazing techs out there I wish I had the time to learn but just don't. I made the decision to invest my time in Xamarin when I realized that the custom mobile dev market is slowly eating the custom web appdev market I was doing so well in. I made a conscious decision to make a bet on Xamarin (mainly because I knew C# very well) because I saw value in their approach vs others.
I have been very successful financially in my career so it could be that I look at time and money different than others, especially college students learning CS, but my statements were aimed at pro devs.
(an aside, I think Xamarin offers very steep discounts to students)
Maybe the tacit assumption here is that I'm doing development for Android and iOS; I'm currently interested in neither, although I do think F# is a compelling language and I'd love to be able to advocate for it at my workplace. However, given the fact that we're a Linux shop, Xamarin has made it really hard to push for Mono/F# as an alternative to Scala.
Another thing that colors my perspective - I have been on my own for 15 years. I don't have to consider the company, legacy or other devs in the shop. It is me, whom I choose to sub-contract to and what jobs I choose to take on. There is a level of freedom in that I often take for granted.
Right and as an independent dev Xamarin makes a mertic SHIT ton of sense, though once Ruby Motion has Android I'd argue that is a way better value. But as a guy working a day job hoping to bootstrap a startup/indie game on my nights and weekends $600-$2000 is ALOT of dough to drop, Ruby motion is $200 and I can swing that without much of a second thought, honestly I could swing $600-$2000 is within my range also I mean I'm extremely lucky in my salary compared to the rest of the world but it's A LOT harder to justify on top of a $3000 macbook pro retina, an intellij license, and the rest of my day used dev tools. Not trying to attack you on your stance I just would love Xamarin to rearrange their pricing to something that makes sense for different markets. I know that $20 a month plus 15-20% of app profits or something more flexible may make them much more popular with certain crowds.
Here's what I would do if I wanted to learn these tools really well before paying for them: Grab a VM and make a snapshot right before I install the 30 day trial and then just reset to the snapshot every 30 days and reinstall the trial.
You can do the same thing with a trial of Windows which actually lasts anywhere from 90 to 180 days or something.
I think you are missing the point here so I'll layout the three reasons price is a big deal to some (I'm basing my arguments on the ($1000 per platform price because that is the first place I think it's really worth while):
1. If I'm bootstrapping a startup, That $2000 is easily at least 1 entire year of web hosting, or a new MacBook, or a couple of new servers. Bootstrapping has thin enough margains that $2000 is a large amount of money and runway for a young company and that's only for one dev. Have two dev's? that's even more of your runway gone. $4000 could sustain two devs for two months if they are really cheap and try hard. Xamarin is unlikely to save you that two months.
2. If I'm developing an indie game there are A HUGE amount of cheaper better options available. Unity, Unreal, Cry Tech, cocos2D/3D, or Apportable. All cheaper and better for game dev.
3. If I'm learning how to develop mobile apps with the hope of obtaining a full time job. Then Xamarin job posts are fairly rare, so spending even $600 to learn the dev process and then still not have the skills to get a full time position is a losing value equation.
4. There are cheaper tools out there, like Ruby Motion or Apportable.
I think the Xamarin guys are brilliant and made a great product but I think the value is very limited to existing Dot Net or independent app developers. Yes it makes a lot of sense for those groups but there are a ton of others that the price is a real barrier to entry.
I think the only important difference between the $300 and $1000 licences is the Visual Studio add-in and while I prefer VS to Xamarin Studio, I would assume the starving devs at a start-up will be fine with it.
The only way your math makes sense to me is if a start-up only plans on releasing for one platform at first. If you're going to build an iOS app first and only move on to Android if that iOS app is successful than it probably doesn't make sense to use Xamarin.
If you're planning on doing both iOS and Android at the same time (and maybe Windows Phone as well), the added developer hours (same dev or an additional dev) to build the same project in another language instead of sharing 50% of the code and just building another UI would probably cost you more.
I never heard anyone for Xamarin selling it as a game dev solution. IIRC Unity is actually running on the same Mono engine from Xamarin (it's an open source project, but I think they're running it). Last time I checked some of those other solutions had expensive licenses too.
Xamarin is still too new to see lots of job postings looking for that skill. I also think that in the near future companies using Xamarin will use it for LOB apps. That's a big market for .Net developers building desktop software or internal web sites. A transition to Xamarin might makes sense for both these companies and these developers.
The bottom line, products are targeted at specific customers. Xamarin could have decided to go after the start-ups, but since most start-ups are content with releasing an app on a single platform first, the proposition of getting additional platforms with less work isn't that enticing. It's much easier to sell the product to an enterprise as their cost for multiple teams with different skills would be a lot higher than the Xamarin license.
Also I didn't mean this to sound condescending or anything, I'm on pain meds for recovering from a back surgery and having a slight issue moderating my tone.
To add to this: think about the target market for this. It's not the person who knows objective-c and wants to make an Android app. It's not the person who knows Java and wants to make an iOS app. It's the person who already knows .NET and wants to make an app for either of those platforms.
I guess I also made a fundamental mistake in the above sentences. It's not a person, but rather a business that is looking at it. In the .NET world, it's common to have an MSDN license for each developer. Looking at the costs from that perspective and the licensing costs for Xamarin make a lot more sense.
If I'm not mistaken, MSDN subscribers (not BizSpark though) also get a discount on Xamarin licenses (or maybe it was just their university learning subscription)
The killer problem with Xamarin is to use it effectively you have to be expert in both Xamarin and the native platform you're targeting. This is because most of the work of mobile apps ends up being tied to the UI, which has a platform specific API.
If your app happens to deviate from this, then at least for Android once more you're in platform specific land (for example, services), but I've seen people doing things like rolling their own ghetto mini database in C# to give themselves a portable data model, when it would be faster to use SQLite on Android and iOS, just to justify the decision to use Xamarin at all.
So, it can work, but people have a tendency to greatly overestimate how much of a mobile app can actually be platform independent anyway. Games are a different proposition, and this is one reason why Unity has cleaned up.
YMMV but for me, there was not 'learning' of Xamarin. There really is no Xamarin framework - there is the mobile frameworks themselves for which there is an almost 1:1 translation. CalculateFoo in ObjC or Java will in nearly every case be CalculateFoo in C#. In the cases where the recommended method is to use a higher level abstraction (like for table data in iOS), the option to use a mirror of the ObjC pattern is there but there is an easier approach available if you choose that.
The key for me was understanding the idiosyncrasies of both Android and iOS and their patterns and then using C# to craft as much reusable code as possible. It drives my approach and I failed to get the re-use level I wanted on my first true cross platform app build, but since I have learned those lessons I have gotten much better at it.
(note: I have yet to use Xamarin.Forms, this experience is based on Xamarin in the past 15 months)
The power of Xamarin is obviously that you have a single language (C#) even if you have a "fat" UI's that are platform specific. Having a single language means that you can have your business logic as a single code base rather than it in two or more languages with all the consequences of code base specific bugs.
But I do agree with you, Xamarin is not a build once run anywhere kind of solution. If you want to build Android app with it you still need to be very familiar with all the ins and outs of Android, same for iOS.
Someone mentioned Titanium earlier. Titanium shares the major advantages Paulo points out in his case for Xamarin (i.e. single language, cross-platform, native apps, access to native APIS). But Titanium also has a couple clear advantages over Xamarin:
- Titanium is FOSS - Xamarin's cost is merely very inconvenient; its closedness is much more repulsive
- Titanium doesn't sideline those of us who develop on linux (a linux-based OS rules the mobile market, after all)
On the other hand, C# is a beautiful, evolved language that I would love to try out with mobile development, and I can appreciate a shiny IDE. However, as long as the above conditions apply, I'll always consider open and developer-friendly solutions like Titanium first before resorting to Xamarin.
Xamarin's IDE is not as good as VS, but it is often much better than XCode, and C# and F# are both more pleasant languages to work in for people with the vast majority of experiences (C++, Java, .Net, Ruby), so even without all the cross platform goodness I prefer to work with Xamarin. (Swift may change some of that, I haven't looked into it yet).
I've never had a problem easily translating Obj C StackOverflows or blog posts to Xamarin/C# so essentially you get the whole community as well, with no worries about Xamarin specificness.
That said, I think their current pricing structure makes sense for them right now. They are not 'quite' at the polish level, not quite at the level that average people can do things averagely. There is still just a little more cross platform knowledge and effort required. The price serves as both a barrier to entry to manage the community size, and provides them enough capital (on top of outside investment) to keep investing toward a fully mass market approach.
I have done a lot amount of development in MonoTouch / MonoDroid (full time for about 2.5 years now). I started using them back when they were beta, and I would wager we have one of the larger apps written in Xamarin (about 250kloc).
First of all, it's tricky. It took our team a long time to get the rhythm of simultaneous Android/iOS development. For a long time every single push broke something.
Some annoyances:
Visual studio project files don't merge. You need a special xml aware merge tool to do this. Even then, its a pain in the ass.
It can be very tricky to abstract the differences between Droid and iOS if you're interacting with the OS a lot.
Some things to know:
Just because you're in C# land, doesn't mean your API is. You're going to spend a lot of time implementing stuff in C# that feels wrong because your API is ObjC/Java.
Sometimes there isn't a good mapping between NS data types between the APIs.
You're going to spend a LOT of time in the iOS / Droid docs, so you'd better be comfortable with ObjC / Java.
Personally I much prefer Ruby Motion to Xamarin. I like ruby more, it's a closer work flow to my standard python/django, Ruby/Rails based workflow (terminal and text editor based). Intellij provides a great ide (MUCH better than Xamarin studio, one of my least favorite IDE's all though visual studio is even better than intellij's offerings IMO). In version 3.0 they will offer Android support and at that point I think Ruby Motion will be the best native app option.
Almost forgot to mention that, all of the ruby is compiled down to actual Native obj-c runtime code. Great performance and look, as good as a regular Obj-C or Java app.
Thanks! I wasn't aware of that announcement. Last month's blog post says: "If you have a RubyMotion app for iOS or OS X and want to port it to Android, you can even share some of the code." (http://blog.rubymotion.com/post/87048665656/rubymotion-3-0-s...)
I haven't used Ruby Motion myself -- do you know how much of the code can be reused excluding platform-specific UI stuff? There's a significant difference between 5% and 95%. :)
From the blog post, that seems like a rather perilous approach.. what are the chances they get all the builtin Ruby stuff to work the same way despite basing it on Java equivalents?
This is mostly true with Xamarin also, platform code is platform code. Most of your code sharing is business logic/accessing rest api's/core algorithms. UI/platform type of code is always going to be hard to port. That being said MacRuby (which is basically what Ruby motion is and JRuby (ruby on the jvm which I think the Android is based upon) are pretty close to source code compatible last I checked so I think it's likely a good chance.
And what are the chances they get all the Android Ruby stuff to work perfectly in the initial release? As opposed to 6 months later after the bug fixes are deployed; hope you didn't have a release window for that fall 2014 app!
(Perhaps I'm overly cynical, though I've seen this before on other platforms.)
Actually I'd say pretty good as their software has been really high quality so far. That and the fact that JRuby already exists and I'm pretty sure thats the target runtime, a lot of their work is already pretty solid.
I realize that the difference of $700 could be made up in improved development performance but I really, really wish they'd allow VS support for the indie license. It's not a case of saving more it's a risk/reward thing for me. I can see the possible value but, without being able to pick it up quickly in an environment I know I can't justify either spending an extra $700 or picking up another IDE/workspace along with the curve of mobile dev and setups for the different devices. Though I understand the cost, it provides tremendous value and you can't just give that away for free.
It's clear to me that Xamarin is trying to get everyone to pay right now. The free license won't even allow you to build the Xamarin.Forms demo, and Forms is one of the most significant new features they added. Cross platform apps with a common UI and codebase, no more separate views for each platform, and data binding! I think they're scaring off small developers by requiring the several hundred dollar investment to use Xamarin, even if it is a great product.
Where I work, we chose Xamarin over PhoneGap/Cordova.
Good decision since Xamarin is much more native when compared to PhoneGap/Cordova (Titanium is another thing I've been looking at). The student discounts for $99/year/platform should be the normal price.
I disagree. The core write-your-code experience is full of jank, to the point where I have wondered in the past whether the XS folks develop it in XS. Its smart indentation isn't smart (randomly indenting another three levels, not being smart enough to stick to the indent level I pick when I backspace to where I want it--next line, back out there again!) and occasionally the text widget will "lose" a line of text and take a few seconds to remember that it actually exists.
The Xamarin toolchain has steadily improved and its PCL support makes a lot of things a lot easier, but I can't envision a use case where I would want to do my development in their IDE. I keep a Windows machine just to have VS so I can do the 90% case there and suffer through the 10% in XS.
The line issue pops up for me in regular control for blocks and I'm using the most recent beta (which I'm uncomfortable doing but had to do to get anywhere). My indenting still gets very confused anywhere I have #if blocks.
You know I like you guys, I loved doing GSoC with Mono and I wouldn't have interviewed over there if i didn't like what you're trying to do, but these issues make it really hard recommend Xamarin. Having my IDE make me legitimately mad is a bummer.
The only thing that I'm really missing is Resharper. For other things XS is very similar to VS. Remember that the cost is $300 for each platform, so you have to spend $600.
It's native look and feel though, and not native integration. However AFAIK it goes to great lengths to blend in with the actual device you're running it on.
It's a common misconception that phonegap and cordova don't have the same access to native APIs. They do, but they are limited by what plugins are available, and your ability or interest to build ones to fill the "gap."
For example, I wrote a plugin recently to send low-level broadcast UDP packets on Android and iOS through Cordova. The plugin API is just a bridge and sets up a calling convention for Javascript-to-native code.
100% true. I'm going to piss many off by this statement I'm sure... but if you are a web developer Xamarin offers no advantages against PhoneGap/Cordova I don't know anyone that is "just a C# developer" and hasn't done any web development, maybe Xamarin makes sense for those.
Take a look at Ionic Framework if you think PhoneGap/Cordova can't provide a native look and feel.
The big question IMHO is will Microsoft buy Xamarin or not. If they do the price will certainly fall drastically. On one hand it will give MS way more apps on their app store. On the other if Xamarin becomes very popular Apple may block Xamarin built apps from it's app store.
Apple tried blocking certain platforms in the past, at that time Xamarin wasn't included since they are following the guidelines set in Apple's developer terms of use. Apple changed their mind very quickly about that decision too.
Xamarin still requires a mac. Your code is still compiled using LLVM (or whatever engine Apple will introduce later). The resulting app that is uploaded to Apple looks just like an app that was built using XCode.
It will be interesting to compare a simple app and see the difference in the resulting package between Xamarin and XCode
You can't really compare them. MonoCross is a crossplat MVC framework that you use on top of Xamarin's Monotouch/droid/etc. to increase your shared code. Xamarin allows you to write about the same code for multiple platforms, but it doesn't make it easier to share the same exact code. E.g http://components.xamarin.com/view/xamarin.mobile
The code looks similar across platforms, but it's not exactly, the same - you can't make one change and have it carry across to all platforms. Monocross brings you closer to a write-once for all platforms experience.
It's the better choice for a number of reasons when the scale of the application(s) increases a lot. It's a premium product that comes loaded with features you need when you're building something at a scale larger than independently developing a single application.
But I think the main differences you'll find, irrespective of scale, are a powerful designer/storyboard tool, Visual Studio integration, and the kind of support you'd expect to find from a paid product.
Unless I'm mistaken, MonoCross isn't a replacement for Xamarin (formerly Monotouch and Monodroid). It's a layer on top that abstracts the platforms differences. You'd still need a Xamarin.iOS and/or Xamarin.Android license to use it.
There are so many factual errors and outdated assumptions in your thread that i wont take the time to do a writeup. To put it short:
- You're wrong.
- Given the current speed of Javascript on mobile, Xamarin is just a job creation tool for unemployed .NET/WPF Developers. - You cannnot reuse run-of-the-mill web devs for hybrid app development.
- Good web developers are just as expensive as good native devs.
- Hybrid app development is not easier than native development.
I forgot to add this to anyone who disagrees with this comment. Take a look at Ionic Framework if you think PhoneGap/Cordova can't provide a native look and feel.
How much time will it save you? Lets imagine your current project to build an iOS and Android app of identical functionality you are estimating at 6 weeks for each platform. 12 total weeks. Lets say that Xamarin tech gives you a 10% boost (it will be much higher but lets be conservative), that means over the 60 business days, you get back 6. Assume you have 8 hours of work per day and you just bought 48 hours of your time. The basic license which does nearly everything most people need is the Indie license and $300 per platform. Six hundred dollars to buy 48 hours of your time back means the purchase is viable if you value your time at more than 12.50 per hour.
If you value your time less than that, you have bigger problems than which mobile tooling to use.
The truth is the productivity factor is much higher than 10% and the license is good for a year, pick up a couple other projects like this through the year and that number collapses. For me this year I will probably do 4 cross plat projects with Xamarin and my productivity diff is north of 50%. The purchase is a no brainer.