Building Apps For IOS, Android And Windows Phone Using C# And Xamarin

Surabhi C.
3 min readApr 8, 2020

When asked about the best programming language to develop cross-platform apps, there would not be a better answer than C#. Yes, it’s true that C# is probably the best language for mobile application development.

Anything which a developer can do in Objective-C, Swift or java, is also possible with CSharp. C# is a simple, object-oriented and a general purpose programming language that gives developers the power of strong typing language. It provides typing suggestions so that they can type safely with fewer keystrokes and less errors.

The asynchronous programming offered by the language will help you develop responsive apps that work well with various mobile devices. In other programming languages one would need callbacks and manual bookkeeping processes for asynchronous programming, which is not the case with this cross-platform app development language.

While the functions like Lambdas are unavailable or cumbersome to use with Java and Objective-C, one may feel very easy to use them with CSharp.

For a mobile app developer, it would not be possible to learn every language and IDE specifics for app development for every platform. Hence, here comes the Xamarin technology to the rescue.

With C# and Xamarin technology, you are ready to build apps for one platform and share the large subset of that application code across various platforms while still building a native user app with native user interface on top of the code of each platform.

Yes, one can easily use Xamarin.Forms to develop native iOS, Android and Windows Phone applications from the very single shared CSharp codebase.

Using Xamarin for Mobile Application Development
If you want to develop cross platform apps in C#, then you will need Xamarin framework. Xamarin is powerful programming technology that brings together the rich features of C# and .NET to create fully featured android, iOS and Windows Phone apps.

In order to develop cross-platform apps with Xamarin first you need to install the technology for the purpose. The Xamarin cross-platform mobile apps development approach is based on few commonalities as well as the differences.

With this technology, it is possible to implement the common application features in a shared library which can be further deployed for use by each platform specific application and this can be done using the .NET classes.

Not only the common features, with Xamarin, one can also develop platform-specific code with unique features specific to that particular platform.

Hence, creating apps for Android, iOS and Windows Phone with Xamarin will involve creating the following projects.

1. The Android app project containing the code specific to the Android platform
2. The iOS app project containing the code specific to the iOS platform
3. The Windows Phone project containing the code specific to the Windows Phone platform
And last but not the least
4. The portable or shared library project containing the common code shared by all the applications

The Best Benefits of Developing Mobile Apps with Xamarin using C#

1. With all the features of the most powerful IDEs, Xamarin will help you enhance the development process.
2. Xamarin allows using Native APIs to give the best device-specific experience to the users while enjoying the facility of shared code, application logic and full API coverage.
3. It gives the ability to reuse of the code, tools, skills and most importantly team efforts thereby saving up the time and resources for the developers.

So, if you want to develop apps for iOS, Android and Windows Phone all together for your business needs, then go for the services that make use of C# and Xamarin for the purpose because mobile application development with Xamarin and C# will help you save time, resources and costs for your needs.

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