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Comment by ChicagoDave | Hacker News Reader

There’s a well-established and highly supported alternative:

https://dotnet.microsoft.com/en-us/apps/maui

I'm still salty over them stealing the name of a totally different, open source cross platform UI kit. Classic Microsoft

I'm not sure Maui has been production ready long enough. It has not even been GA for a year yet.

Has anyone here have experience with this? We're currently looking at a forward-looking stack for our multi-platform app, and to be fair the general feedback we read is that they all suck in certain ways. What's the least bad out there?

My experience: MAUI is not yet polished/complete enough for production (in my experience trying to use it for both iOS and macOS apps).

If I wrote an article about trying to develop in Xamarin.Forms (MAUI) it would read like the Flutter article that brought us here. Way better than Flutter but still needs work. I spent years on the bleeding edge and mostly ended up with builds failing and other nagging problems. Drained all of my energy. I went back to web dev and have been using Vue 3. Pry it from my cold dead fingers.

I greatly enjoy building in Maui. By weird chance my first programming gig was in UWP and it’s a pleasure to be working in C# .NET again, able to build UIs with xaml and dynamically out of the code, but with a bigger prospective audience than “people who install uwp apps.”

That said, I’m only playing with it right now - I’m doing some weekend projects hacking against LLM APIs and it’s a great way to stand up a simple app quickly that runs on my phone and debugs at the computer and could theoretically one day be on the mobile app stores. But I would tentatively agree with other replies that it might be a little early for commercial adoption. I haven’t encountered any show-stopping bugs or limitations yet, but at the same time when researching for troubleshooting and bug fixing I will find git issues that were resolved less than a year ago for things like images not displaying on android. The built-in MediaElement for video playing only just came out and doesn’t support true full screen playback yet.

The other factor from it being new is just the lack of community discourse about it. The docs are great but you’re not going to find many discussion on git and SO about it yet, and the search space is cluttered with results about Xamarin.Forms that are sometimes relevant and sometimes completely not. So IMO that means people should give it a try! But maybe hack on it first before committing to shipping commercial software.

Has MS released a commercial/production app built on Maui yet? Are they eating their own dogfood?

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