Microsoft To Acquire Xamarin (phoronix.com)

New submitter androlinuz writes: Microsoft has signed an agreement to acquire Xamarin, a leading platform provider for mobile app development. In conjunction with Visual Studio, Xamarin provides a rich mobile development offering that enables developers to build mobile apps using C# and deliver fully native mobile app experiences to all major devices, including iOS, Android, and Windows. Xamarin's approach enables developers to take advantage of the productivity and power of .NET to build mobile apps, and to use C# to write to the full set of native APIs and mobile capabilities provided by each device platform.

Comments

Re:Wow

[xxxJonBoyxxx]

>> Xamarin's approach enables developers to take advantage of the productivity and power of Visual Studio to build mobile apps

FTFY. When we were building our last set of apps, we were happy that our developers could reuse their Visual Studio / C# skills; we purchased Xamarin so we wouldn't have to care (as much) about what the compiled code ran on, and specifically so we could avoid hiring more than a handful of dedicated Android or iOS developers (to perform touch-up work if necessary).

Good

[ilsaloving]

Normally, I would say that this is a bad thing, but Xamarian's pricing is brutal anyone who just wants to play around, explore, and possibly try to sell an app or two if they're halfway decent. When I was looking at cross-platform development tools, I was really interested in using Xamarian, but I wasn't about to fork over $1000/year just to play with developing cross platform software (ie: mobile AND desktop). And their starter edition only runs with Visual Studio, which is Windows only.

QT is even worse. Their documentation actually states "Please consult a lawyer before using QT for commercial development". Their pricing is so brutal they don't even advertise it on their website. I had to google for leaked price lists just to get a ballpark figure, and the prices almost made me fall out of my chair. So heaven forbid you write an app and think, "Hey, this ain't bad. I'll put this on the app stores and see if anyone likes it." QT will be suddenly expecting several thousand dollars right up front before you legally able to sell.

I really like the "It's ok, you can pay us once you're making money" system that Unreal and Unity have switched to. THAT's how you encourage indie adoption. Unfortunately they're geared primarily for making games, not regular applications, so if you wanted to create some kind of database-type system or whatever, then those toolkits are not a good fit.

Re:Good

[Anonymous Coward]

I was super excited to try Xamarin last year. I spent a night downloading and installing their software after seeing that they did have a free tier for developers to test their apps to see if Xamarin worked for them. The download and setup took so long that I ended up having to call it and finish the next evening. So I sit back down at my computer the next night, only to then have to go give my life story to Xamarin just to open their software. Finally, account registered, I open up their own tutorial which is a simple "Hello World" app. Literally, it just displays Hello World on the screen. I go to run the app and get:

"We're sorry, this application exceeds the compiled file size limit for your tier. Please upgrade your subscription to continue."

After Googling this extensively, I found that apparently the limit is so arbitrarily small that there was no point, and that Xamarin themselves had already responded to user complaints on this and doubled it to get to the limit I had hit.

I then spent the next evening uninstalling their software.

In short, I felt lied to about their pricing practices. Don't advertise your "free tier" if it's not even usable. I lost three evenings of my life to that.

So me hearing that Microsoft bought them out sounds like an amazing move, if for no other reason that I hope Microsoft will at least put some of the basic functionality in Express so I can finally try it out.

Re:Good

[StormReaver]

QT is even worse.

I used Qt extensively for years. Qt >= 4.0 is LGPL (unless that's been changed when I wasn't looking), meaning you are free to use it for closed-source purposes as long as you don't modify the library itself.

That being said, I find Java to be much better than Qt for desktop software in almost every way.

Re:Wow

[PmanAce]

When I built my app for droid and touch (android and iPhone as you can imagine), my client couldn't tell the difference between native apps and my apps because the end result was a native app.

Re:Microsoft also owns microsoftsucks.com...

[LostMyBeaver]

WPF is a library that is on top of the .NET framework. It isn't part of the .NET framework. Just like glibc isn't part of the Linux kernel.

The entire .NET platform as well as the compiler is open source and pretty good stuff too.