However, sometimes you may need an App that sits permanently on a phone. The reasons for this may be aesthetic or they may be functional. An App may be branded and designed differently than a website and it can also take advantage of all of the phone’s features e.g. push notifications, camera, GPOS, etc more easily than a mobile web solution can. Finally, an App can work offline, which is particularly important for some B2B solutions that we have developed.
What to Consider when Building an App
Along came a number of “write once, run everywhere” platforms where you could compile your code and then push it to both iOS and Android. Hey, presto! Two Apps for the price of one.
There were technical and aesthetic limitations in this approach, which Xamarin quickly realized and overcame. Xamarin allows for cross-platform implementations across iOS, Android, and Windows mobile from a single C# code base. It also allows for the creation of native user interfaces so that you can take advantage of the rich capabilities that each unique platform provides.
We fell in love with this technology and were the first Australian company to embrace it long before Microsoft purchased Xamarin in 2016 and have continued to train our developers in its use.
Is There a Loss of Functionality with Xamarin?
Xamarin apps have the full range of functionality usable by the selected platform and device. These include platform-specific capabilities such as Android Multi-Window mode and ARKit.
Xamarin Apps are compiled for native performance and they can leverage platform-specific hardware acceleration. This is not possible with apps developed that only interpret their code at runtime.
It should also be mentioned that, unlike previous hybrid solutions, an app built using Xamarin can be defined as native. This is because the performance metrics are equivalent to Android apps built with Java or iOS apps built using either Swift or Objective-C.
Are there Other Benefits to using Xamarin?
Secondly, there is full hardware support. There is no hardware compatibility issue. This is due to it being able to use specific plugins and APIs to work with the different platforms
Finally, Xamarin also supports linking to native libraries. This means better customization and native-level functionality.