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Comment by Zigurd | Hacker News Reader

The author's complaints about Xamarin might be true, but it is also likely that Xamarin is less broken than any other cross-platform solution. If a client insisted on one code-base for iOS and Android I would choose Xamarin.

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.

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A lot of fans of Microsoft/C# (Myself included) would love to see some sort of acquisition happen. They definitely have some sort of relationship already. What I do find really interesting is that Microsoft seems to be pursuing Cordova (aka PhoneGap) as well.

http://www.visualstudio.com/en-us/explore/cordova-vs.aspx

So is IBM, with their Worklight platform:

https://www.ibm.com/developerworks/community/blogs/mobileblo...

Weird.

> If a client insisted on one code-base for iOS and Android I would choose Xamarin.

Have you considered Ruby? With Ruboto for Android and RubyMotion for iOS, I'd think you could get a pretty good single-codebase solution. I ask because as a Ruby dev who may one day branch out, I'd like to know what I'd be getting myself into, and it sounds like you might have gone down that road.

My experience with Ruboto has not been good. Gave it a try during a sojourn away from Xamarin (which I use for the game I'm making, but Ruboto was for something else) and its perf was really unfortunate on a Nexus 4, not much better on a Nexus 5. You'll end up writing anything nontrivial in Java anyway, making a lot of it moot.

RubyMotion now has builtin (beta) support for Android.

http://blog.rubymotion.com/post/97668474211/announcing-the-p...

This seems like a viable approach in the future. I hope you are not suggesting that it is OK to send code compiled with a beta version to a client.

> I hope you are not suggesting that it is OK to send code compiled with a beta version to a client.

If the client's demanding a single-codebase solution for both Android and iOS and you are better at Ruby than you are with either Java or Objective C, then it might make sense to sell the client on using the beta.

I guess it depends on the client, if he is willing to take the risk that, for e.g., his app won't be compilable with the final version of RubyMotion. You can probably convince him it is a good idea if you specify in your contract that you will offer support in the future when RubyMotion for Android is stable.

I think RubyMotion could be a good idea, even today, for someone that knows and use Ruby for his own projects.

> If a client insisted on one code-base for iOS and Android I would choose Xamarin.

Except this is not possible, as you have to recode the UI for each device anyway.

So just go C++, or any other language with compilers that can target C, and do as little as possible in the UI part.

Companies like Dropbox are following this approach.

In principle, Xamarin Forms should enable many common UI elements, like list views, to be coded cross-platform. In practice, I wonder if that holds up well w.r.t. hooking the list views up to the model behind them. But, nonetheless, Xamamrin supports both cross-platform and native UI elements, which seems like a practical approach.

All that said, I would normally advise a client not only to have native code, but also large amounts of native design for their main platform targets. Lots of Android apps suffer from port-itis. Transliterating an iOS implementation inevitably makes for a lackluster Android app that underutilizes Android modularity features among other things Android does well.

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