While it does comply with title rules, I feel this could use a better title - have they just moved to Github, or did someone just find Xamarin interesting and decide to post their Github page?

I agree, don't understand what this post is about.

Agreed, I'm also confused.

While I do like the title rule, the literal <title> tag in this case has just been generated by Github. The HN submission could be more clear.

It was announced that it was going open-source a few weeks or months ago, so maybe today's the first day it's up on github? Or someone just happened to notice it today.

Maybe "Xamarin on GitHub"?

I wrote a PoC (Proof of Concept) a few years ago of recompiling Xamarin iOS apps to Android without code changes and we released a few apps using that. It is especially handy for LoB (Line of Business) / internal apps which actually are very usable like this. Clients loved it as they only had to pay once. It has parts of the Core Graphics and Core Animation implemented as the last app I ported with it was heavy on those.

This was before Forms came along. No clue if anyone would be interested in it, but i'm cleaning up the code to put it on github as open source.

This would be interesting. I'm looking to create a MVP for a game like app and am researching ways to make it cross-platform compatible without sacrificing performance.

Check my profile and drop me a mail with stuff you would need for that I can tell you if it would work.

Is it better than Forms? It sounds the same, so I doubt it would be very interested for Xamarin.Forms users.

Well it is different in that you write apps with the iOS API and recompile for Android. So it is an implementation of the iOS API on top of the Android API. It was a PoC so 'better' is not really a related term :)

I see. I guess that is different.

That would be quite interesting to see(and use?).

I started experimenting with Xamarin after they made it free with the open source announcement and I'm cautiously optimistic now. I can work around the works of Xamarin Studio (or the VS plugin) and I like C# and Swift about equally, but app startup time specifically seems subpar with Xamarin.

Edit: more on topic, the open source move is fantastic! I felt the money might be worth it for not only the tooling but also the top notch documentation, but I've never been able to convince any of my bosses on this.

Apps built with Xamarin (or a similar system where you bind to platform API's) or so much better to build and use than these cross platform platforms.

Since I'm just starting to learn it, does anyone have opinions or tips around Xamarin? Specifically I'm building a toy Android app to learn the stack, but I'm curious as to just how much reusability there really is between Android/iOS and other platforms.

If you're going to make a shared backend between Android, iOS, or other platforms Xamarin supports, I highly suggest using MvvmCross to guide the structure of your project. I've worked on a project with a custom backend and it was a monster of a codebase that I never was able to fully understand. However, if it's mostly just UI and little backend, do your own backend, because MvvmCross would introduce unneeded overhead.

Let me know if you have any other questions.

We maintain a large app using MVVMCross, it was originally using Forms in the PoC but had to be rewritten because of a number of issues. Off the top of my head I remember there were a lot of UI issues, binding to native modules was next to impossible in some cases, and it was buggy and unstable for complex interaction.

You must know how the UI work in both oses if you want to be capable of using xamarin efficently. Yeah, there is XamarinForms that tries to solve that problem, but it is very... bad, right now.

Xamarin forms is good for very limited uses. They give the basic layouts that each platform supports and that's about it. So if your app is simple, it's a great option.

Anyone who is serious about cross platform mobile development, whether it be Xamarin or React, needs to be well versed in Cocoa and the Android SDK.

> Anyone who is serious about cross platform mobile development, whether it be Xamarin or React, needs to be well versed in Cocoa and the Android SDK.

Then why would I go the Xamarin route in the first place? The whole point is to avoid having to learn both platforms. Personally, I'd rather struggle with two native codebases than to struggle learning an imperfect abstraction that still requires me to learn both platforms.

For me the point is being able to reuse the core code, in this case the logic of a small game, but it could be API integration just as easily.

So far the C# abstraction of Android has if anything been easier to use than the official Java API, or at the very least less verbose.

There's also react native.