Modern-day businesses are looking for alternatives to develop and deliver applications faster but at a reduced cost. This has been a challenge to many companies over the years. Hybrid app development has enabled companies to produce apps rapidly and cost-efficiently. And, companies that plan for hybrid app development mostly favour Xamarin for enterprise mobile app development for its ability to simplify developers work and ensure faster delivery.
Are hybrid apps the future of mobile development?
Mobile applications are no longer a choice but a necessity for enterprises. However, the real challenge is in deciding on native vs. hybrid apps. With both having its own advantages and limitations, choosing the best is always challenging.
However, according to several reports, 80% of enterprises are focusing on developing applications supporting multiple platforms like iOS, Android, and Windows, because hybrid applications are easy to use and cost-effective.
So, hybrid apps will the future of mobile app development.
Well, the next question you’d like to hit me with subsequently is why Xamarin for hybrid app development?
The sections below would help you understand why Xamarin platform is widely preferred by enterprises for hybrid application development.
Why is Xamarin used for cross-platform development
Before we get to why we think that way, let’s understand why you must choose cross-platform applications instead of native apps. If you are planning on an app for your business, here are some reasons that make enterprise heads to invest in Xamarin platform over the native app development.
- Open source platform
- Native-like user experience
- Reuse of same API
- Shared app logic
- Advantage of C#
Enterprises looking for advanced, powerful and mission-critical business applications find Xamarin as the best-suited platform for their unique needs.
As a developer of an enterprise, what do you look for in the platform? Check out the advantages below.
7 Advantages of Xamarin for Enterprise Mobile App Development
As a Xamarin app developer here are some of the advantages you can enjoy.
Seamless and easy to use
The development process timeline with Xamarin is relatively shorter. It offers a comparatively simplified way of sharing codes across multiple mobile platforms and thereby takes less time to build an app.
Apps built with Xamarin provide a better experience to the users because of the standardized UI controls. You don’t have to develop any extra plug-ins thanks to the standardized UI controls.
Thanks to the integration of SDK, Xamarin makes it highly easy to add new features and auto updates the different versions of the app the moment the changes are effected in the OS.
Xamarin uses C# and the .NET framework -a proven, reliable developing environment – for all mobile platforms.
Anything that can be achieved with Objective-C, Swift, or Java, a developer can do in C# using Xamarin. You can integrate native open-source libraries available for iOS and Android with Xamarin.
A lot of existing open source and in-house source code projects can be reused in Xamarin.iOS or Xamarin.Android projects thanks to the C# and .NET framework combination.
Normally, the process of testing a cross-platform can be long and tedious. However, the Xamarin TestCloud allows the testing of applications on the cloud, making the process simpler, shorter and faster.
Highly flexible
Xamarin is primarily built on open-source technologies offering you the flexibility to choose components according to your requirements.
The component store of Xamarin offers a great value-add that provides several resources for developers, including cross-platform libraries, UI controls, and third-party web services.
Robust performance
Before we discuss performance, for starters, Xamarin has two main approaches, where one is a Shared UI and the other is a Separate UI. In a shared UI, nearly all the code is shared in all the platforms.
In a separate UI, only Business logic is shared, while you have to make separate user interfaces for all the platforms. Both approaches are equally popular.
Xamarin’s performance is close to native. Apps built on Xamarin.Andriod or Xamarin.iOS mirror native as the development is focused on sharing business logic rather than codebase.
The cross-platform capabilities use native UI controls and leverage platform-specific hardware acceleration, which enables in achieving close-to-native performance (which cannot be achieved with solutions that interpret code at runtime).
Even when a developer goes for the Xamarin.Formsapproach that is focused on broad code sharing with less platform-specific behaviour, the majority of the source code can be reused with Xamarin.Forms.
By virtue of using shared code, Xamarin leaves fewer bugs to deal with. With Xamarin TestCloud, developers can test apps with fragmentation, CI, and object-based UI testing.
Besides, developers can also test the health of the app using Xamarin Insights, which is a real-time app monitoring module.
100% Availability
If offline usability is a key differentiator for your app, thanks to the fact that Xamarin is backed by the Microsoft-Azure ecosystem, it offers reliable cloud-based data synchronization, which helps in using the app even when not connected to the internet.
Thanks to the integration with Azure, you can expect unhindered network connectivity that ensures continuous app performance and reduces performance lags – things that are crucial to success.
High scalability
As Xamarin is a Microsoft-driven product, by default Visual Studio becomes your environment to develop, build, and debug apps. Visual Studio contains a code editing environment, a simulator to try the app that you develop.
Developers can use the VS App Center to test the applications on various devices in a cloud. This offers you the flexibility to test different new features offline even while the app is being used in the market.
With Xamarin your app is future-ready as it works with some of the latest SDK’s and utilizes common and platform specific API’s.
Xamarin tightly binds the SDKs and the APIs of multiple platforms which enables developing high-quality applications as well as providing support for new features as soon as they are plugged into the operating system.
Best support
By virtue of using shared code, Xamarin leaves fewer bugs to deal with. With Xamarin TestCloud, developers can test apps with fragmentation, CI, and object-based UI testing.
Besides, developers can also test the health of the app using Xamarin Insights, which is a real-time app monitoring module.
Xamarin comes with deep integration with Azure Cloud, and hence comes with a robust app development environment and helps developers create rich mobile apps.
The Azure cloud provides the benefits of scalability, on-demand resources, high-availability, and cost-effectiveness along with the added benefit of high support.
Incredible security
Using Xamarin and Azure, you can be assured of the app and data security. As the connections between different app components are hosted on the Azure cloud and are encrypted, your app is secure.
The secure the connection between your app and the backend Azure comes with HTTP certificates and 24-hour threat management protection against malware.
By leveraging the authentication services provided by Azure developers can also securely integrate social media logins with the backend.
These are some of the advantages that make enterprises to leverage Xamarin for hybrid app development requirements.
Conclusion
No denying the fact that Xamarin app development is going to the future of enterprises. But, how do you get started? It requires expertise and experience to build applications that delivers amazing performance to customers.
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