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Comment by kayoone | Hacker News Reader

instead of relying on HTML5 as your base tech stack for mobile apps i am much more a fan of approaches like xamarin (http://xamarin.com/)

Basically you write the core of your app in C# and then use the bindings to the native SDKs of iOS, Android, WP to build real native UIs on top of it. Its a bit more work and you need to learn C# (which is awesome) but imo its an optimal compromise between speed of development/maintainability and the resulting user experience.

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I think it's important to note that Xamarin is closed, and you are tying yourself to a third party platform that is outside of your control - and possibly outside of your best interests.

You may decide that it's a fair trade off, but it's very important to understand and acknowledge that there are many externalities involved in this decision that may cause you trouble in future. There is a reason OSS is so highly prized...

I have used Xamarin recently - while I absolutely loved developing an iPhone app in C#, it was a bit frustrating to see that all the best 3rd party libraries, tutorials, etc for iOS are all in objective c - and some concepts didn't seem to translate easily to C#. It was my first iPhone app, so I could be mistaken - but I think I'll go down the native route in future.

In my experience, it's fairly trivial to create a library binding so you can use ObjC library in C#. They even released a tool that generates bindings by header files, called ObjectiveSharpie.

Yes and I've used it twice - the problem is that all the documentation you'll find naturally uses objective-c code - which you have to understand anyway to get it translated to c#.

Xamarin is wicked expensive...

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