How does Xamarin Helps in Reducing App Development Costs?

Mobile market is saturated with a number of devices and operating systems, which makes it a challenging task to create an application that work the same across any device. Then what about developing an app for a single platform? Which platform should you target? Android holds a larger share of mobile users while iOS customers spend more time on their mobile applications. What if you are planning to engage Windows app users too? In most cases, enterprises want to create an application that deliver multi-channel user experience thereby destroying competition and bringing businesses to new levels. Whether it is about operating on a shoestring budget of a small enterprise or boosting efficiencies inside a larger one, you need to find a solution to make mobile app development more manageable and affordable. And that is why you need to consider cross-platform mobile app development.

As the name implies, cross-platform mobile development refers to “the creation of a mobile application that are compatible with multiple mobile operating systems”. Even though, cross-platform app development suffered major setbacks in the past, it has re-emerged as a powerful methodology in the recent times. In fact, there are a number of cross-platform frameworks available, such as Xamarin, Qt, Phonegap, Ionic and React Native. These tools facilitate the development of mobile applications that adapt and follow design and interaction guidelines put forth by different platforms. In this post, we are going to talk about Xamarin mobile application development in particular and how it helps in reducing the app development costs.

Xamarin is a powerful and popular mobile app development platform built by a team of developers led by Miguel de Icaza that created Mono. The Xamarin company was founded on 16 May, 2011 which was later acquired by Microsoft in 2016. Though it is a comparatively new tool used for cross-platform mobile application development, Xamarin community has over 1.4 million developers across 120 countries. Choosing Xamarin app development provides a number of benefits such as:

1. Single tech stack to code for all platforms


2. Native performance and user experiences


3. Smooth on-boarding


4. Reduced time to market


5. Less maintenance

Xamarin frameworks consists of following major components:

1. Xamarin Forms


2. Xamarin Test Cloud


3. Xamarin.iOS and Xamarin.Android


4. DevOps Support tool


5. Platform SDKs

These components enables Xamarin apps to look, behave and perform the way the end user expects. If you are planning to develop a native application for each platform, then it could cost a pretty penny. Since each platform has its own tools and languages, you need to engage different developers, different codebases and different technologies for building native applications for each mobile operating systems (OS). And this approach results in higher development costs, longer time to market, increased maintenance and support team issues. But when you opt for Xamarin tools, developers can reuse code for iOS and Android versions of an application which cuts down development time and efforts by a greater extent.

Xamarin uses C# along with .NET framework in a Visual Studio integrated development environment which reduces app development and life-cycle management costs. Sharing and validating the source code across the major platforms helps in maintaining a bug-free code. Xamarin provides both Automation Framework and testing cloud support (Xamarin TestCloud) where developers can test their application on any device in cloud. Uploading the test suite and running it on a chosen device will provide the developers a detailed report of app performance metrics and results. Furthermore, it is possible to monitor the real time performance of Xamarin mobile apps with Xamarin Insights. When you choose Xamarin mobile application development for android, iOS and Windows platforms, it helps in optimizing the utilization of developer resources, reducing the total cost of development.

To sum it up, we can say that choosing Microsoft Xamarin cross platform mobile app development helps you save money and enables faster time-to-market. So, the best thing to do is to consult an experienced and reputed Xamarin app development company to create apps for multiple platforms with cost effectiveness. Talk to us at Logiticks to get started on your new app today!