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Comment by martinni | Hacker News Reader

I'm not a phone gap expert by all means, so I can't speak for it's new ability. But I wasn't very pleased with my experience when I did have to use it.

Now that Xamarin is free, it's very hard to say no to such a powerful tool.

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If I am not mistaken doesn't with Xamarin mean you need to build the UI code once for each platform?

This says you can share 96% of the code base across platforms:

https://www.xamarin.com/forms

Xamarin Forms dev here. This is true. I wrote an audiotour app and I was able to reuse everything. The only thing I couldn't reuse was the audio player because of differences between platforms, but still you can use plain old Xamarin.Android and Xamarin.iOS. Pretty good results and you save ton of time.

curious is there design pattern for that? could you still have one code base similar to how different processors are compiled? or some kind of wrapper component? seems like there should be someone to write the code once and not need to make a copy.

Xamarin provides a bunch of generic controls that act as bridges to their corresponding platforms. It has enough flexibility that you can build the UI code from scratch for each platform, but you could probably put together a simple form based application with a single UI source.

Yes, and that is why those apps look and feel better - you use OS native widgets that users are familiar with and feel as their OS does.

Meanwhile you still can share most of the code in the app.

That's where React Native comes in ;)

Build for IOS/Android/UWP/Ubuntu/OSX all in the same base.

This is what I came here to say. Cordova is relevant, yes, and many people use it. For basic applications, Cordova applications can feel "native enough".

However, I don't think Cordova is necessary anymore with Xamarin.

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