Why you should learn Xamarin

Well, there are many scenarios where Xamarin can save the day, and in some cases literally months.

Let's say you have an idea for a mobile application that you want to develop. Of course, you want it to be developed soon and get it to market. But there are some small challenges and decisions that you should overcome or decide on before you dive into your development process.

Let's have a look at those challenges:

• Choose mobile platforms to target: This is a very important part in the planning phase of our application. The mobile platform market is divided into major players, such as Android, iOS, and Windows. To get the most out of our application, we will want it to be accessible and available to the majority of users out there.
• Learn a platform-specific coding language or have platform-specific developers in your team: Now, let's assume you have chosen to target all three of the major mobile platforms. We have a clear idea that we need to develop our application for three mobile platforms. Here, if you are developing it alone, then you need to learn all three different platform-specific languages. Android has its own official IDE, similarly Apple has its own IDE and coding language to build iOS applications, and Windows has its own as well.
• Spend time and resources in development for each platform: Three different platforms, three different languages, and three different IDEs. That is going to be very time-consuming and the learning curve is going to be a major issue. Or, you have three different developer teams for each platform; then, you will be spending a lot more resources on your development.
• Try and maintain a consistent behavior in all your applications for each platform: Now, let's assume you have decided to have multiple resources for the development of the application. Now, all different mobile platforms have a variety of different methods for user interaction, and different ways of designing user interfaces. Developing different platform applications with separate teams can sometimes make the user experience of the same application drastically different on these platforms.
• Maintain all the platform-specific codebase for your same application: Development challenges never end once initial development of the application is done. Whenever you add new features to your application, you will now have to apply the same changes and features to all three platform-specific codebases, repeat the same business logic, and develop the same feature in different ways on different IDEs.

From the preceding scenarios, you can see that developing a mobile application is not that simple and straightforward nowadays, if we have to go through different coding languages and IDEs to do so.

It increases our time to deliver by a huge amount and is very expensive in terms of time, resources, and of course money.

In order to solve all the challenges, Xamarin comes to our rescue. Xamarin saves the developer from the need to learn different programming languages and different IDEs.

Not only that, we also get the benefit of writing our application code just once and building to different mobile platforms. And if you are a C# developer on the .NET framework using Visual Studio already, then you just hit the jackpot. Because guess what, that's all you need to start development using Xamarin as far as language and IDE goes.