Xamarin, a platform on the Microsoft stack for building mobile apps using C# and XAML has some competition now. Xamarin is a great framework and it is going to get even better with the release of .Net 6 later this year. But Xamarin isn’t the only game in town for mobile development on the Microsoft stack. And the alternatives have something that Xamarin don’t, at least not yet.
Two of the competitors offer cross platform development so not only can you build a single application for IOS and Android you can also build for MAC OS, Linux and the web (WASM). As of this post some of the tooling is in the early stages but there is enough there to get started today.
The two alternatives to Xamarin for Cross Platform Development are the Uno Platform, which favors the UWP version of XAML and Avalonia, which favors the WPF flavor of XAML. I have been experimenting with all three of these platforms and can’t wait to see where they go as Microsoft build out and releases the Win UI libraries.
