[mathijs]

I've used Xamarin for several projects and I greatly regret that decision. Granted, most of my hatred is targeted towards Xamarin Studio and Xamarin.Forms so if you use Visual Studio and build only native UIs then maybe your experience will be better.

However, in my experience, both Xamarin Studio and the build system are buggy as hell. Random or inexplicable build errors, things that break during updates, incompatibilities with official Android support libraries... I find myself doing 'clean project and rebuild' to fix random errors, or switching between alpha, beta and 'stable' channels all the time depending on which one does not have the bugs that I'm running in to.

Xamarin.Forms is simply a disaster. Because it aims to unify the apis for the UIs for various platforms it boils down to only the most common denominator of those platforms. And then makes it worse. Not only is it buggy, it is also very slow and incredibly limited. In our office we're keeping a list of all of Xamarin's silliness we encounter, here is just one of those:

    "Clicking a Button changes its text alignment from center to left-aligned; it requires writing a custom Renderer to solve this."

I admit that Microsoft is usually quick to fix those bugs, but it doesn't instill much trust in the system if you're constantly running into issues. Many days I am literally working 50% of the time on my app and 50% working/fighting my way around Xamarins issues.

I'd love to hear from someone using Visual Studio if their experience is more positive, but my advise is: please stay away from Xamarin.Forms and Xamarin Studio as much as possible.

[rogihee]

I have used both "native" Xamarin and Forms to build apps. Last year Xamarin had a really bad streak with stability but things have certainly improved.

Android itself has so much quirks in development in itself that it is sometimes impossible to abstract away. Xamarin just doesn't show this always so you're chasing the wrong ghost from time to time. Android development is simply madness.

I'm not gonna say Forms is perfect, far from it but it serves a purpose. With a little bit of work I could get everything going that needs to be done. As a single dev I can cover both platforms. If you have the resources go native Xamarin.

Xamarin Studio is actually not that bad, only it has become a bit of resource hog last weeks releases and needs the occosional restart. With the power of MS behind that should certainly be improved.

Xamarin.Forms is now open source, but I really hate that the PR's are slow to being reviewed and 1 contributer is outpacing the Xamarin team in his spare time. Clearly something is brewing, they must be working on something new. Or else they should ditch and start something else.

We'll hear about it in a few days.

[dep_b]

I can't find anybody that has done significant work with Forms and isn't complaining about it. It's giving the platform a really bad rep.

[ghuntley]

Forms is not Xamarin. It's a DSL in the form of a NuGet (aka npm/cpan) package developers can use to attempt to ignore the differences between the platforms.

It's kinda like swing. Great for throwing together a line of business application and getting xplat ui for free. It's possible to build a performant application with the framework but it abstracts subtle things that come back to hurt you. For example. Forms apps on Android is a single activity, always, period. Fragments are cycled in and out of this activity as navigation occurs. This introduces subtle annoyances related to memory usage as the entire app must be running vs thin slice. It transforms the lifecycle of Android into the UWP or iOS lifecycle.

Again this is Xamarin Forms. It is not Xamarin. It has its place but please don't confuse the product due to poor branding.