Xamarin makes me sad, here is my message to them

Having said that, I gave Mono for Android a try as a hobby again this year and it was light years better than when I left. (Congrats guys!) However there were definitely still bugs that were mildly annoying as a hobbyist that I can see would be infuriating if I had to rely on it for my job.

Doing what Xamarin does is VERY hard and Xamarin hasn't had big-time funding until recently. And they can't stop and just fix bugs, like the article author would like. Xamarin is on the treadmill and has to keep up with two platforms that are in competition with each other. The only good news in that is that they will probably converge in terms of capabilities. But, damn, I wouldn't want that job.

3rd party dev tools are a thankless and usually VC-less pursuit. The investors are probably hoping for an exit in the form of Satya Nadella taking C# and VS cross-platform and using it for Microsoft's own apps.

I can definitely see how chasing Apple, Microsoft, and Google's yearly mobile API revisions can be a task. I don't think that necessarily justifies throwing the entire project out (maybe just some careful evaluation of their mobile oriented offerings). It's akin to throwing all of Java out due to your displeasure with Android development (of which I have a long list of grievances).

I just lost a few days of development researching Qt for mobile. With the outcome that it still has a lot of catching up to do.

First issue that was found. The common file dialogs present a desktop file selector on mobile devices! Apparently this is being fixed for 5.4, but it requires the UIs to be written in QML. No such luck for those using pure C++ Widgets.

Then the documentation about Qt Quick versions, how to integrate with C++ Widgets and the various ways the deployment to mobile devices can be customised requires a bit o hunting and asking questions on the forum.

On my case we had deployment working without issues in the emulator, only to be greeted with a blank screen on some mobile devices.

Since a good UX requires using the expected platform behaviours, the best approach is to use C or C++ for logic with a thin shim for the UI and device sensors.

Way more productive than hunting third party integration issues, without any guarantee of having them fixed.

As an equally (un)valuable counter-anecdote: I spent about 9 months developing a set of apps for Android and iOS with Xamarin and didn't encounter many of these problems.

We did find one bug in the toolchain. We reported it, Xamarin responded with a workaround in 1 day and a fix in 7.

From what I can tell it isn't that great for the end user either. I recall once trying to install a mono based tool on OSX. It was... unpleasant and I ended up simply choosing not to use it.

Series A: $12MM Series B: $16MM Series C: $54MM

$82MM and they still haven't fixed the fundamental issues that have existed from day 1. Stability and support should always come first.

I just stumbled upon this https://gist.github.com/anonymous/38850edf6b9105ee1f8a and decided to write one too. I don't have affiliation with the OP, but I like his idea and really understand his points.

I used Xamarin for the past year or something, not givin real date to keep this anonymous so they dont block my account ;) All the information here is subjective, I'm just expressing my rage in a very emotional way, take it with a grain of salt. Xamarin, if you're reading this, PLEASE TAKE SOMETHING POSITIVE FROM THIS AND GO FIX SOME BUGS.

TL;DR: I love C# more than any other language, but Xamarin is HORRIBLE. I wish it and mono were never invented. It's a disgrace, completely broken and buggy and just the most broken thing in the entire universe, but I still use it.

Why? Because I can write for 2 platforms as if it was one. haha, not really ... but because I work on small apps, I don't have to write all the business crap twice. That is good about Xamarin, that is the only thing. They can actually compile plain C# ... hooray. If only the rest of the crap expensive broken Xamarin crap library actually worked as advertised.

I'm sorry for being so dramatic, but really if something costs a thousand dollars a year per platform, you kind of expect the damn company to put some love into the thing. You would expect bugs to get fixed, and for things to work. But no, that is not the case.

Look at Xamarin Forms. Oh a shiney new thing that builds real cross platform UI, so nice. EXCEPT THAT THERE ARE MILLION BUGS IN IT. Fundamental bugs, crashes, memory leaks and other memory issues, broken resource handling ... just serious things that normal company would never release to public, but Xamarin debugs on paying customers, on customers who pay thousands of dollars.

If you don't believe me, go to https://bugzilla.xamarin.com/ and look at the bugs, or look at mono release notes. Just look at the list of shiny features of Mono (http://www.mono-project.com/docs/). Well half of that crap is either broken, or was never implemented, or just doesn't work as documented. Everything is just a lie that should make it look good. Xamarin does thousand things, they release new iOS SDK the same day Apple releases it ... wow ... if only they waited a year and then released a working version instead. They make thousand cool features, but they're all broken.

All developers make mistakes, we all create bugs ... but software that costs a thousand dollars should work. It shouldn't leak memory like a total noob, it shouldn't crash the compiler when you compile, and it should work the same way when you compile once and when you compile twice, really the compiler is sometimes just so broken.

PLEASE STOP ADDING NEW THINGS, STOP MAKING INTERFACE BUILDERS AND SHIT THAT WILL NEVER WORK, AND JUST FIX SOME BUGS. I want to say something positive, but really I just want to scream and cry and I don't know what to say.

I wish I could use something else, I wish I could go back to doing things native, but the things I work on are too invested in Xamarin that there is no way back ... I guess I'll just have to run away.

Oh btw, in case you're writing something important, like something working with money, or human lives, or just moving around pictures of cats, pick some other technology, maybe go with native C++ if you want to share your biz logic. Maybe write it as a native things, just please, be careful. There are dragons here.

A closing thought. Xamarin is trying to do something amazing. Xamarin.Forms is an amazing technology and makes me really happy at times ... but then I try to do something special and find 50000 completely stupid bugs on each platform, and I start raging again.

Please Xamarin, I'm begging you, allocate more humans to fix the bugs, stability is important. And if you manage to accidentaly fix something, please don't break it. I'm always shitting my pants whenever there's a new update, because almost always things get broken.

P.S. I'm writing this anonymous because I'm trying to say what is really in my heart. I wouldn't be able to do this in any ot her way, because if certain people found out, I could lose my job, and I value it too much. But still I think this is the right thing to do. I'm not trying to put a bad light on Xamarin, I just want to express my feelings.