Slashdot Mirror
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.
ho hum... .Net was better off as 2 companies instead of 1
Xamarin provides a rich mobile development offering that enables developers to build mobile apps using C#
Oh. Here I thought that Xamarin was specifically intended as an alternative to Microsoft's proprietary implementation of C#. Oh, well, shows what I know. I guess we've always been at war with Eastasia.
Seems like a good move to me
That summary is worded distinctly like a press release. Slashvertisement?
never heard of them.
Looks like Miguel de Icaza has officially become part of Microsoft. Maybe he can pull a Elop and get Windows 11 to use Gnome as its desktop environment.
-- Political fascism requires a Fuhrer.
Now that Microsoft open sourced .NET (https://github.com/Microsoft/dotnet) this makes sense. Really happy for everyone at Xamarin, they are one of those companies that put in the work and deserve this.
Modern app appers know that ONLY apps can app apps, so Appersoft should have bought out an app apper that apped apps in AppScript, not LUDDITE .NET!
Apps!
He's been an apologist for MS in the OSS community for as long as I can remember, this seems like a natural move for him.
Microsoft has signed an agreement to acquire Slashdot.org :)
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
Wow.
Someone ha d a second glass of the cool aid.
bickerdyke
Have you ever heard an actual hands-on IT person describe any IT component as having a "rich" quality to it? It seems like a writer's use of language to ascribe a tactile quality to something which has no tactile properties.
Backdoors and telemetry on all platforms!
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.
In the past .NET was a way to lure dev to Windows and to anchor them there.
What is their incentive today for .net
1) open sourcing
2) supporting and now purchase of Xamarin?
If xam/mono gets MSed than it seems even less safe to use .net as they may pull the plug on Mono anytime.
Is it a ploy to sell more VisualStudios? And then WinOS for devs? Can't see a big money in this for MS...
4wdloop
.NET has productivity and power?? Who knew??
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
Like most stuff at MS these days, it's Azure. A mobile app is just another front end to a web applications, and this makes the case of having using .Net from end to end and hosting in Azure and using things like Azure Mobile Services, Service Fabric and so on.
Miguel de Icaza, you earned it.
If you were me, you'd be good lookin'. - six string samurai
Lol
Reading these is like someone going on a rant about IBM. Strange today, as MS lost the monopoly they had.
The incentive is simple. Why do they still sell Office to Mac users? To make money. Visual Studio is another money maker. If they can't beat em on the mobile platforms at least join them and make money for app makers. VS code already runs on Linux natively and VS 2015 community edition even has full Android SDKs and emulators and java 7 jdk. No I am not making this up.
MS incentive also is the new CEO wants cloud and services and less concerned about platforms and tie in like Gates was. Azure has FreeBSD and Linux vm's ready to boot as they make money either way whether you use Windows or not.
Xamarin makes sense in that you are not tied to one platform. MS is turning into IBM after they lost they became more open. The UI and integration might not be as much but a Xamarin app for IOS will likely run on Windows Moible for easily with porting.
In essence the incentive for Sun with Java and why they didn't really capitalize on it. The idea is if they give java away these applets run on Solaris so what do you know?
http://saveie6.com/
Xamarin simply sponsored Mono, but that doesn't necessarily grant the ability to kill it. How would they "pull the plug" on an open-source and free project? Besides, it would just scare people away from .NET in general, so I just don't see that happening.
Microsoft is simply embracing other platforms, especially mobile, as they well understand they don't really have a serious dog in that fight with Windows mobile. They'd like to keep developers on Windows, and offering high-quality tools for multi-platform development is a way to do that, because yes, both Visual Studio and Windows (for PC) are important products still, despite overall waning importance of the PC platform. At the very least, keeping mobile developers in the VS environment certainly won't *hurt* their own product line, as they may get some ports they otherwise wouldn't have.
Even so, when your company is focusing on services like Azure to a much greater extent, the client's platform doesn't really matter quite as much. I really don't think it's anything more complicated than that. People keep looking for deep, nefarious reasons for what MS does, when most of it can be explained by reasonably straightforward business strategies or strategic goals.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
As the monkey once said, Developers Developers Developers! It's Microsoft trying to get people used to using Microsoft tools. If you use Visual Studio, you can use its built-in Xamarin integration to develop your Android and iOS apps. Once you're doing that, you really might as well also publish for the Windows app store - it's minimal additional effort and nets you at least a few percent more of the market - and that's what Microsoft really needs people doing.
The whole "Windows Phone / Windows 10 Mobile is a pretty good OS, runs on some nice hardware, etc... but it has no apps so I went with Android / iOS" thing has been discussed nigh unto death, both on Slashdot and across the broader web. Microsoft has, for years, been searching for a way to get developers to publish for the Windows [Phone] store. If they can get people using the tools and frameworks, and make it *really* easy to then target Windows as well, they can perhaps finally solve the chicken-and-egg problem: Windows phones don't have many apps, so they have low market share, so there aren't many users to buy apps, so most developers don't publish apps for them, so there aren't many apps...
If Microsoft can break that loop, they have a chance in the mobile market again. This is one (of several) approaches that they are taking to try and achieve this.
Disclaimer: Not a MS employee, and the above is based on personal observations and guesswork, not on published statements or insider information.
There's no place I could be, since I've found Serenity...
It was overdue. Oddly, I think it was Xamarin that delayed this acquisition. I think MS would have been happy to pick them up two years ago. For all the flack Miguel de Icaza gets, he is a big open source supporter, and I bet he was concerned with how that would work being at MS and all. But, when .Net core happened, the writing was on the wall, and now they can just get .Net core to be what it needs to be.
Make no mistake, this is a play to displace some existing players and to encourage adoption of hosting on Azure and using Azure services. It's a good story for a lot of companies. You can use one set of skills (C#/.Net) to address development from end to end and you get pretty streamlined hosting (via Azure). Compared to having to assemble all the pieces from front to back, plenty of companies will take the ecosystem lock in.
Xamarin acquires RoboVM. Microsoft acquires Zamarin. Interesting timing. And goodbye cross-platform mobile java...
Xamarin sounds like a prescription drug, not some sort of web tech.
I just renewed my license back in December.
As others have noted, the license structure was brutal - I'm a consultant and just needed Tamarin for a few times a year I have to help out a particular client with a Tamarin built application.
They wanted *$1K* for a license, even though I'd hardly be using that. Luckily I was able to talk them down a fair amount after explaining the situation, but given how many consultants are active these days in helping smaller companies build applications, they really should have had some kind of intermediate tier.
I'm really curious to see what Microsoft does with Xamarin, you have to wonder if they will decide to shut down the tooling and have people use Visual Studio...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Whatever. I was forced to use Xamarin in a previous job and it is the clunkiest piece of SW I have ever used. There is a mantra that every dev should chant - cross platform toolkits do not work at least if you are interested in writing UI once and deploying across multiple platforms . They are fine for an enterprise level piece of SW but ultimately they resort the LCD and you end up fighting the tool and wishing to god you could just write native code.
The 1990s called and asked you return your paranoia.
I don't know about you, but with me MS has burned a lot of trust. I mean a ginormous amount. I don't trust MS and I don't trust the judgement of anyone who isn't wary of MS. MS isn't looking as evil as a few years ago, and their surface hardware looks quite neat actually. But there is quite a bit more that has to happen before I trust MS again with running anything mission-critical for me.
I don't know if this is going to help or destroy Xamarin - I'm sorta caught in the middle. Or so I wish. ... But glancing over to Nokia, I'm not placing any bets on Xamarin. Companies bought by MS too often die specatularly just a little bit later.
I wish it were different, but the statistics clearly point against Xamarin surviving an akquisition by MS. That's the plain, simple and painful truth.
It's a shame for Xamarin actually - it is a neat x-plattform toolkit and I've used MonoDevelop for some projects. Very cool and quick to set up.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca