Features and Benefits of Xamarin Mobile App development
Before knowing about the features of Xamarin one should know what is Xamarin. Xamarin helps in cross-platform mobile app development, which means that, the mobile apps developed using Xamarin can run on any kind of operating system, namely, Blackberry, Android, etc. Earlier when mobile apps were developed they were operating system specific. So, for Android systems, one can use a separate version of an app, while for the same, the source code and therefore, the version will change when built for Blackberry. Therefore, the basic source code will be different and the effort behind designing the apps becomes a minimum double. In order to minimize this effort, such a cross-platform development tool has been introduced by Microsoft. This tool was originally developed by a group of engineers and then it was acquired by Microsoft. Microsoft introduced Xamarin as a free tool within the integrated environment of their product, Visual Studio.Why Xamarin for Mobile App Development?
After knowing about Xamarin, we might think that what was the need of introducing Xamarin or in other words, the benefits of Xamarin. The introduction of Xamarin has decreased the total dependence on Java. Java provides a wide range of APIs that help in developing apps. However, the main problem of writing applications in Java is that such applications can only be run on Android. But how do we cope with the increasing uses of Blackberries? We need some API developing tool that can have a programming language as a backup which will be universal. Xamarin mainly runs on C#. If you ask the developers almost 80% would comment that they love to do the programming in C#. That is why Xamarin app development is popular. Such developers have started preferring Xamarin.
Portability is another factor that makes Xamarin popular. Having said the fact, Java applications are also portable, but even so, after developing a Java-based app for an Android application, you cannot port it to an iOS system. On the other hand, Xamarin applications can be easily ported, even to iOS devices. After Microsoft had made Xamarin open source, the portability has become even easier and developer friendly. In fact, developers can change and that will not affect Xamarin tool development at all.
Talking about open source, Xamarin, also attracted a huge amount of fund for development from a lot of eminent software companies like Red Hat, JetBrains. This is due to the fact that this development platform has been made open-source by Microsoft. Therefore, this tool is highly popular with developers.
The environment of Xamarin is integrated with SDK, so that app developers don't have to recreate the basic necessities every time, they are developing an app. This integrated platform uses the common APIs to develop advanced features in an app. This helps in removing redundancy in development and making the app development faster. In fact, with more and more introduction of newer versions of an app, this SDK integration has become highly important among the developers. There are separate libraries to support the SDK of Xamarin.
Read more about the Xamarin App development companies in India.
Maintenance of Xamarin is very easy. This is one of the biggest reasons, it has become increasingly popular with the app developers. The chances of sudden evolving of bugs are less and this platform can be easily modified to incorporate better user-friendly applications.
Why not Xamarin?
The biggest challenge of app developers is to design an app in Xamarin that will consume very little size in the phone of the user. In today's world people are very much dependent on apps for various reasons like booking air tickets, booking hotel rooms, checking flight status or tracking an ongoing flight, etc. Now, if the size of the app is huge, then it becomes pretty difficult for the users to load it in their phones and using it.Features of Xamarin app development tool
File access- Xamarin is built on the infrastructure on .NET and C#. The .NET APIs help in quick access and storage of the files in the Android platform. To keep some security level regarding the file access and also to incorporate the ease of file access Xamarin has two types of storages-Internal and External. The former can only be accessed by the app where the file is stored and the operating system that stores the files, whereas the latter can be accessed by any other app downloaded in the device.
App linking facilities-This feature has been easier to deploy in the Android applications due to the presence of Xamarin. This is important for businessman, who use mobile phones as a tool for business. When a businessman clicks on a URL link, then the mobile browser would try to identify the URI in the link and launch the app that is associated to the URI.
The interface for Xamarin tool on iOS devices contains the following tabs, namely,
Application Panel, which showcases the common properties that an user will deal with while using the mobile applications daily. Advanced Panel, which is a panel containing the information regarding the different supported document types.
Source Panel, which deals with the properties that could be customized for a certain application.
For Mac applications Xamarin has integrated environment of Microsoft Visual Studio in it. This environment includes a framework of either .NETor C#, which are the basic constituents of Xamarin. This framework helps in creating more user-friendly, cross-platform mobile apps.
The test cloud feature of Xamarin is mainly helpful for corporate houses that develop Xamarin applications. After developing the applications, they must make sure that such applications can be used cross-platform, or they can be deployed properly on mobile phones. For this reason, the test cloud feature is basically a solution to support the testing of the apps, before they are actually downloaded by a customer and that too with a minimum cost.
To conclude, Xamarin is a wonderful tool for mobile application development. This is the reason why it is popular with the engineers and the corporate houses. If you are a software developer in India, you can think of learning Xamarin related tool development for the betterment of your career.
