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Comment by sker | Hacker News Reader

At least they have a free version to play with. They didn't even have that a while ago.

I'm not in the mobile apps business, but if I were, I would consider the price worth it.

As a freelancer, I see a lot of people requesting Android and iOS apps. I don't see myself developing in both Objective-C and Java. With Xamarin I could cover three platforms with one language, which also happens to be my language of choice for productivity.

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I kinda thought the same thing and its especially attractive since I've written a lot of C# code. But I discovered that the Mono mobile framework wraps the respective devices UI APIs fairly faithfully - and learning those is the more laborious part. In other words, it doesn't abstract all of the devices and you still need to understand how to code for each one. You just get to do it in C#.

I still think it has great value and you most likely could share some of your code between devices. It just wasn't as seamless as I had thought supporting multiple devices. I think HTML based apps do have that one advantage.

The MvvmCross pattern they've been promoting seems promising for maximizing shared code. We've got the most benefit from sharing stuff like libs, network code, GLES, etc. I've come to the conclusion that the thin platform API is an advantage because I'm so, so tired of punching holes through crappy abstractions.

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