This is Xamarin forms with a new name.
I would not be surprised if MAUI also gets abandoned halfway through development.
Xamarin.Forms was great for getting prototypes going to get things running then going in and taking areas you need to customize, or all controls, and making them platform specific to the targets.
You can still have a shared library that does Content/Pages and most of the work shared. I don't know if Xamarin.Forms was ever meant to be a full solution but it is ok for prototypes and enterprise, for actual consumer shipped apps more customization was needed and CustomRenderers.
The Shared [1][2] setup this way is similar to the handler approach in MAUI where underneath the shared abstraction controls are converted into platform specific but you can do custom ones to override or combine controls.
[1] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/xamarin/cross-platform/app-...
[2] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/xamarin/cross-platform/app-...
I think there is potential for redemption here -- although I do worry the native widget binding approach still comes with a lot of friction that adds unavoidable complexity. However, Maui's new "handler" pattern for native widgets seems like it could be adapted to support Skia/manually rendered widgets if someone wanted to invest in that non-trivial effort.
From my experience the native widget binding is both the strength and the weakness of the approach. You get to take advantage of battle tested native controls that are fully featured. But if the platforms don't have enough similarity between them to create a cohesive interface then you're battling multiple platforms trying to take advantage of the native features layered in another opinionated model that sometimes can be detrimental to the native performance you're hoping to leverage.
I'm hopeful though.
- They're going to support MVVM and MVU (MVU is similar to JSX with React).
- You'll be able to target all these platforms from a single C# project. With .NET 5 and earlier, Xamarin required you to have a separate project for each target. This will result in a simpler codebase.
If it turns out to be XamarinFroms done well, I can dig it.