Friday, 13 October 2017

How Startups can use Xamarin to Gain an Edge Over Competition

The software development industry is always in a state of rapid flux. Especially if you are a startup working in the highly competitive and rewarding sector of enterprise mobility. There are challenges galore but so are opportunities. It is important to have your finger on the pulse of the market and be quick to latch on to trends that define the next wave of technology. In the context of mobile applications and web app development, there are several new technologies and trends that have recently captured the imagination of the tech community – Xamarin for app development is one of the most promising trends.


Why Xamarin?
If you search Google trends then Xamarin cross-platform mobile app development services is a prominent search term. There is suddenly a great deal of interest in Xamarin’s potential as a cross-platform framework that lets developers use C# and .NET – that is a near-native experience because it creates a wrapper over the platform-specific SDKs. Let’s take a look at Xamarin’s capabilities in detail.

Native UI in all three platforms:
The difference between Xamarin and other HTML-based cross-platform frameworks like Ionic is that Xamarin creates native UI using native APIs for each platform providing a wrapper over its own SDK.

So, whatever you can do with your native OS, you can achieve with Xamarin and the end-result will be identical. For instance, the creation of TextView in Xamarin is the same as Android or for that matter, even UILabel creation is the same as iOS. This ability to transcend platforms is a great strength for startups who don’t need to spend additional time, resource and money on creating apps for each platform.

What’s more, Xamarin includes Windows Phone and Blackberry users that make a tiny but important percentage of mobile OS users.

Lower cost of development and shorter cycles
As startups are constantly looking for ways to be more cost and time efficient, Xamarin’s low cost of development is a great advantage. Since Xamarin requires only one language expertise – that is C# and utilizes a high percentage of code sharing. Most of the functional bugs and non-UI enhancements have to be done only once and need not to be replicated for each platform – saving a great deal of time and cost. This allows companies to ship quality apps faster.

Improved Time-to-Market and Maintenance Downtime
The extent of code sharing with Xamarin range anywhere from 50% to 100%. The ability to ‘Write Once, Run Anywhere’ by sharing the application logic across systems reduces the team’s time spent on software building. Post sales maintenance is also a breeze with Xamarin because the team need only spend time on fixing issues once.

Mobile is only the tip of the iceberg
While Xamarin has received wide recognition for its mobile app development capabilities, there is more to Xamarin that points to the future of app development. With Xamarin you can build wearable apps, Mac apps, tvOs apps, OpenGL games, SceneKit/SpriteKit/Metal Games and much more. This allows startups to leverage the unbridled potential of application development and gives them an edge over competitors. 

Summary
Xamarin has indubitably carved its name as the go-to framework for startups. As a modern and sophisticated tool, it provides significant gains in cost, quality and time to market the apps. But its selling point is certainly it's near-native app experiences that have made the open-source technology the most coveted one. Have you built mobile apps using Xamarin for your startup? Do share your views in the comments section below.

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