Companies that Use Xamarin

Benefits of Using Xamarin

• Free and open-source: Xamarin, part of the free .NET platform, is free of charge for personal and commercial use. This open-source framework has 60,000+ contributors from 2,700+ companies actively working to make it better.
• Cross-platform development: This app development tool lets you share over 75% of your code across different mobile operating systems. You can access native APIs from your shared code.
  
  Xamarin.Essentials gives you platform-specific APIs, such as Clipboard, Compass, Detect Shake, Email, Color Converters, App Information and so on, using which you can develop a high-quality mobile app. The single, cross-platform API included in Xamarin.Essentials saves you so much time as you don’t need to write code separately for each platform.

• High-quality UIs: Xamarin.Forms, an open-source UI framework created by Microsoft, allows you to build cross-platform mobile user interfaces. You can achieve a consistent material look and feel across different platforms using Visual API, and can also create a native look using platform-specific features such as Android elevation, iOS Safe Area and Windows ListView.
  
  
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  You can create stunning UIs using the Xamarin.Forms’ built-in layouts, pages and controls. This tool also lets you customize the behavior of any control and define your own pages, layouts, controls and cells. You can build declarative UIs using XAML and non-declarative UIs using C#.
  
  You can learn how to build UIs using Xamarin.Forms on this page.
  
  Useful UI components from companies like Telerik, Syncfusion, GrapeCity and DevExpress will make your work a lot easier.

• Great availability of useful learning resources: There are a huge number of learning materials available for Xamarin.

• High performance: Apps built with Xamarin are native mobile apps. Xamarin apps run at a lightning-fast speed as it lets you utilize platform-specific hardware acceleration and gives you full access to native APIs.
• Fast app development:
  
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  The code-sharing facility, Visual Studio tools, AI-assisted IntelliSense, effortless debugging, high-quality DevOps tools, remote iOS simulator, profiler, auto-provisioning for iOS, and Xamarin features such as Xamarin.Forms, Xamarin.Essentials and SkiaSharp greatly speed up the app development process.
   

Drawbacks of Using Xamarin

• Pricing: Although Xamarin is completely free of cost, you need to use Microsoft Visual Studio for commercial development, and its licensing fee is not cheap. Take a look at the pricing details here.
• Platform-specific limitations: With Xamarin, you will face some platform-specific issues. Some of the notable iOS-specific limitations are disabled runtime features, no dynamic code generation and no remoting. A few Android-specific limitations include limited support for Java generation, limited support for dynamic language and partial support for Java generics.
• Not good for game development: Although you can develop mobile games using Xamarin, this framework would not be a great choice for game development as you cannot share much code across platforms, especially for making games with great features and interactive UI elements. You should rather build games natively as it will give maximum performance.
• Xamarin is difficult to learn for those who don’t have C# and .NET skills. To master Xamarin, you must first be good at C# and .NET.

Companies that Use Appcelerator Titanium

Benefits of Using Appcelerator Titanium

• Real-time mobile analytics:

• Cross-platform development: You can reuse 60-90% of code across different platforms. This saves a huge amount of time.
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• Drag-and-drop palette:
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  Titanium’s App Designer includes a drag-and-drop palette that allows you to visually design your apps effortlessly. It produces high-quality code. Using this framework, you can easily create visual effects such as dynamic animations.
• Pre-made push notification service: You can engage your app users using the push notification service of this framework.

• Great performance: Titanium apps are fully native apps. A feature called Hyperloop lets you directly access native APIs so you can easily implement platform-specific features in your app. Direct access to native APIs gives you a performance boost. You can also run native code such as Objective C, Swift or Java code besides Titanium code, which amazingly boosts app speed.
• API Builder: Titanium’s API Builder lets you assemble models, APIs and connectors for data access, and allows you to build data models programmatically and through a visual wizard. You can normalize your data and deliver it to the client. API Builder provides you with pre-made connectors for MS SQL, Box, Mongo DB, Salesforce, MySQL, etc.
• And finally, you can write code in JavaScript, which is a great benefit if you love this language.

Drawbacks of Using Appcelerator Titanium

• There’s a price involved: Although this framework offers a free version, it doesn’t have all the features and it doesn’t give you much flexibility. You need to spend money on the premium version to get all the Titanium’s facilities.
• Hard to make complex apps: One of the major disadvantages of using Titanium is that it’s difficult to build mobile apps that involve much complexity.
• Issues with SDK: You may face SDK-related issues with Titanium, which will waste your time and effort.
• As you can’t add HTML and CSS code, DOM elements and animations can become less responsive.

Top Apps Built with PhoneGap

Benefits of Using PhoneGap

• App development using your web dev skills: If you already know the basics of web development, you can quickly learn PhoneGap, and making an app with this framework will be a breeze for you.
• Access to native APIs: As PhoneGap allows you to access all the native APIs like camera, accelerometer and GPS, you can easily develop native functionalities on your mobile app and your app will have a native look and feel.
• Cross-platform development: From just one codebase, you can develop apps for multiple mobile platforms. Thus you can reach more customers. Cross-platform app development saves you a great amount of time.
• Open-source framework: PhoneGap is free and open-source. This app development framework has amazing community support. There are a great number of people out there ready to help you out and also working full swing to improve this tool.
• Powerful tools for app development: PhoneGap gives you powerful app development tools such as PhoneGap CLI, PhoneGap Desktop app, PhoneGap Developer mobile app and PhoneGap Build. PhoneGap CLI (Command Line Interface) lets you create, compile and run code from a command-line terminal. You can use this tool on any platform. The PhoneGap Desktop app gives you a graphical user interface for making mobile apps. You can download the Windows version of this app from this link and the Mac version can be downloaded from this link.
  
  
  
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  Using the PhoneGap Developer mobile app, you can develop an app, perform testing and check how your app looks on your mobile phone. With this tool, you can see app changes and check whether your app works well on a mobile phone or not, without re-signing, re-compiling and re-installing your app.
  With PhoneGap Build, you can package your app in the cloud by simply uploading HTML, CSS and JS files.
• Plugins and third-party tools: Plugins let you extend your app’s functionality. You can take a look at the plugin library here. There are several third-party tools built by the community to make your testing, debugging and app-development process easier.

Drawbacks of Using PhoneGap

• Performance issues: The performance of PhoneGap apps is not as good as that of truly native apps.
• Not suitable for game development: PhoneGap is not an ideal choice for making hardware-intensive apps such as mobile games.
• Outdated plugins: Some of the major PhoneGap plugins can be updated. So some features such as camera and geolocation may not work properly.
• You also won’t find plugins for some necessary features, although you can build your own custom plugins. But for that, you need to have native development skills.