Xamarin (not Mono) is a solution that seems like all win: Why bother with completely separate solutions on iOS and Android...and maybe even Blackberry and Windows Phone and...
...when there's a magic solution that covers them all. Surely such a solution would completely take over the industry, right?
Crickets.
Extremely few successful solutions are built in Xamarin. Their case studies are limited, and are generally close to trivial apps. And when you point this out, Xamarin advocates tell you not to use most of the cross platform stuff, but instead use platform specific code that is layered on abstractions from the underlying tech, always a step behind and a mile too far.
I'm not amplifying anything: The market demonstrates every statement. Xamarin is something that floundering teams buy hoping it gives them a big heads up, and then some time down the path they just end up starting separate projects for each platform.
You obviously are heavily biased, and strangely confrontational, towards Xamarin. But this open sourcing has been met with a universal yawn.
Xamarin is a company, not a product. Mono is a Microsoft-sponsored project. If you can't be bothered to get that right it makes it even harder to accept you speaking on behalf of the entire industry.
> "this open sourcing has been met with a universal yawn"
It happened 18 hours ago! Do you think the kinds of companies that code in C# even noticed yet?
At this point I have to assume you're trolling. No one is this obtuse.
Xamarin is a company, not a product
Xamarin the company has a primary anchor product that is a tooling and SDK to build cross platform apps (indeed, on Xamarin.com it is literally the only non-service product. There is zero ambiguity). To anyone not autistic, that is clearly the focus on this entire discussion. Your bizarre incantation of Unity using a very old version of Mono as a citation in support of Xamarin set the bar pretty low for this conversation.
It happened 18 hours ago!
Microsoft made it completely free. Yawn.. Microsoft open sources the entire SDK. Yawn.
Clearly you work either for Microsoft, or you hitched your wagon entirely to Xamarin or Microsoft. Your emotions on this are bizarre and completely out of touch with the reality.
> "All products" list four items, one of which is a product
The Products menu has a fifth menu item, All Products. It will show you additional products.
Apparently you are not familiar with the (bumpy!) history of Xamarin's technology. Now that it's open source, you can actually trace lines of code from Xamarin Platform and Xamarin Forms and the Xamarin Profiler back to the early Mono and Unity days. They were a small team that bit off way more than they can chew, delivered more than seems possible even today, and gradually tightened their focus to mobile.
Now they are open source and have Microsoft fully behind them. I wasted a ton of time and money and performance running under Mono on Linux when I should've just used Windows server. But I got it back using Xamarin Platform on two recent large-scale mobile development efforts.
You win some, you lose some, and eventually you develop the maturity not to claim an entire industry had the same exact failures you did to make yourself feel better. Good luck.
...when there's a magic solution that covers them all. Surely such a solution would completely take over the industry, right?
Crickets.
Extremely few successful solutions are built in Xamarin. Their case studies are limited, and are generally close to trivial apps. And when you point this out, Xamarin advocates tell you not to use most of the cross platform stuff, but instead use platform specific code that is layered on abstractions from the underlying tech, always a step behind and a mile too far.
I'm not amplifying anything: The market demonstrates every statement. Xamarin is something that floundering teams buy hoping it gives them a big heads up, and then some time down the path they just end up starting separate projects for each platform.
You obviously are heavily biased, and strangely confrontational, towards Xamarin. But this open sourcing has been met with a universal yawn.