Choosing cross-platform development over native app development has become a growing trend for startups, organizations and enterprises worldwide.
After all, the cross-platform mobile app development approach brings several invaluable benefits to businesses starting from reducing significant development costs to enhancing time to market.
One of the leading cross-platform development frameworks backed by Microsoft, Xamarin is leveraged by many companies across industries to build their mainstream applications.
Through this post, we’ll walk you through some of the prominent apps built with Xamarin. But let’s first have a quick overview of the Xamarin framework, its market usage and the reasons why companies go for this framework.
What is Xamarin?
Developed in 2011, Xamarin is an open-source framework for cross-platform mobile app development.
It empowers developers to share up to 90% of code to build native apps for major platforms such as Android, iOS and Windows in C# and .NET. Thus, it enables fast engineering which further means faster time to market for a competitive advantage.
A Quick Glimpse at the Market Usage of Xamarin
Like other cross-platform mobile app development frameworks, Xamarin has gained massive adoption globally and here are some numbers that testify it:
- There are more than 13,000 apps powered by Xamarin, amounting to over 2 billion downloads.
- The average market share of apps built on the Xamarin framework is 1.88% and the highest market share of 6.54% for business-related applications.
- Xamarin has over 60,000 contributors from more than 37,000 different companies.
- 11% of developers globally used Xamarin for cross-platform mobile app development.
Why do Companies Use the Xamarin Framework?
Here are some of the key highlights and advantages of Xamarin that make it an ideal choice for cross-platform app development:
Single Technological Stack
Xamarin uses a single language i.e., C# to build apps for all mobile platforms. Thus, it doesn’t require switching between the environments. Developers can engineer everything in Visual Studio or Visual Studio Code.
Faster Development
Xamarin leverages a single tech stack and enables sharing an average of 80-90% of the codebase to build and release apps across various platforms. Thus, it significantly accelerates the development cycle.
Native User Experience
Xamarin ensures user experience and performance close to native as it makes use of native APIs and toolkits. In fact, it’s pretty challenging to tell the difference between a native and Xamarin application.
Low-Cost Development
It now goes without saying that Xamarin eliminates the need to hire multiple teams to launch apps for different mobile platforms.
Instead of hiring native iOS developers and Android developers, you just need to work with a Xamarin development team to build, test and release apps across platforms.
Strong Community Support
From the aforementioned numbers, it’s crystal clear that Xamarin has a strong community of developers and companies alike.
You can easily connect and engage with the members of the active Xamarin community on various platforms out there which include the Xamarin blog, Xamarin Q&A, Stack Overflow and others.
Top 6 Apps Built with Xamarin
Let’s now take a look at some of the amazing apps made with Xamarin:
FreshDirect
FreshDirect is one of the popular online grocery delivery services in the USA. It enables its users to order local and organic produce, chef-made meals, fresh seafood, custom cuts of meats and among others for fast delivery to the doorsteps.
The company initially launched its mobile applications coded in platform-specific languages.
But to meet the demands of every customer and to scale, they shifted to C# from Java
(Android) and Objective-C/Swift (iOS) to accelerate their time to market.
UPS
United Parcel Service (UPS) is the world’s largest package delivery service. Every day, it delivers over 19 million packages across more than 220 nations and territories. The UPS mobile app helps its users manage shipments, track parcels and more while on the go.
Like FreshDirect, it initially built its mobile apps in platform-specific languages i.e., Java for Android and Objective-C for iOS.
By leveraging the Xamarin framework, the company witnessed enhanced developers’ productivity, reduced lines of code and faster time to market.
Olo
Olo is known for developing iOS and Android digital ordering and delivery apps for over 150 restaurants which include Applebee’s, WingStop and Five Guys.
The company also switched to Xamarin to ensure the faster time to market and unmatched user experience that their customers and target users crave. To get into more details, check out Xamarin at Olo.
Alaska Airlines
The next one on our list of popular apps built with Xamarin is Alaska Airlines which caters to more than 44 million customers a year with a route that spans over 120 destinations in 5 countries.
The Alaska Airlines app enables exploring options, booking trips, checking in, moving with ease through airports and finding all the flight details.
The developers at Alaska Airlines build cross-platform native iOS, Android and Windows apps using C#.
BBC Good Food
A worldwide food media brand, BBC Good Food is filled with recipes and food-related content online that span health, travel and family.
To keep pace with the shift of its customers to mobile from desktop, the company embraced the Xamarin framework to ensure convenient access to its content across all channels.
BBC Good Food collaborated with NV Interactive (a Microsoft Gold Partner) and launched fully revamped iOS, Android and UWP applications leveraging Microsoft Visual Studio Tools for Xamarin and Visual Studio App Center.
Novarum DX
Novarum DX designs diagnostic tests for detecting diseases like HIV, Aids & Ebola and hazards like infected water supplies. The team at Novarum DX wanted to build and release an app that would allow users to detect outcomes via a smartphone camera.
The team leveraged access to the native camera and used the same code across platforms to build Novarum Reader i.e., the first diagnostic app.
Using Xamarin, the company assembled only one development team to engineer all apps.
“Since that first app, we’ve undertaken about 20 different projects for a variety of customers, including medical device companies with strict quality and regulatory requirements. We’ve developed a platform approach based on Xamarin that allows us to speed up development for our customers.” – Neil Polwart, Managing Director at Novarum DX.
Also Read – Guide to Build Offshore Development Teams
Hire Expert-Vetted Xamarin Developers from InfoStride
Whether you have an app idea like FreshDirect, Olo, BBC Good Food or others, we have a team of Xamarin developers with expertise across diverse business verticals to help give life to your app idea with accelerated time to market.
With various flexible and affordable engagement models in place, you can hire dedicated remote Xamarin experts from InfoStride on an hourly, monthly or project basis.
We also bring the following advantages if you engage with us:
- Access a large talent pool of pre-vetted tech experts: developers, designers, testers, project managers, DevOps and many more
- We ensure greater time zone flexibility and on-demand scalability
- Support for onboarding, training, infrastructure, administrative, payroll and compliance
- We are open to signing an NDA (Non-Disclosure Agreement) if requested
- A dedicated account manager to keep you updated at every phase of the project for unparalleled transparency
To get started, share an ideal candidate profile or your project requirements with us. One of our experts will get back to you with the profiles of developers that match your needs.
Conclusion
Xamarin enables the building of modern and performant cross-platform applications with near-native performance. Thus, it is no wonder to witness why there are many great success stories of the framework.
Here, we’ve covered some of the top apps powered by Xamarin.
Do you know any other awesome apps built with Xamarin apart from our list? Let us know in the comments below.
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