Its 31st December 2019, and we are about to wave goodbye to a decade that has been eventful for software industry, and it has been no different for me. Over this last decade, I have worked on a wide range of roles involving entrepreneurship, development and consulting. I have also worked with various different technologies and frameworks. But one that’s really close to my heart is Xamarin, and I would like to share my thoughts and experiences being a Xamarin developer.

I was introduced to Xamarin/Mono in mid 2013 and I immediately became a fan of this amazing framework. Being an early adopter I was lucky enough to work with some amazing talents and had the opportunity to learn directly from the experts. Nish Anil is one of those Xamarin gurus who has helped me in my journey and one who definitely needs a mention. I am humbled to say that I have played a small part in spreading roots of Xamarin in India under his guidance.

In the early days of Xamarin, two other frameworks that gained a lot of popularity were Sencha Touch and PhoneGap. Xamarin easily stood out from them, even though it had its fair share of bugs. What was really appealing for most developers including myself was that, I was able to develop cross platform mobile app and still have native UI, using my favourite language C#.

Over the years, Xamarin matured itself to be one of the finest enterprise mobile development framework, and new rivals such as ReactNative had brought in some need for innovation to the Xamarin table. And hence Xamarin Forms was born. Xamarin Forms brought in a lot of abstraction that made Xamarin development easier, and had introduced some new complexities too. It had borrowed some principles and architectural patterns from WPF, which attracted a lot of developers, but sadly introduced certain performance bottlenecks and development complexities for mobile. People still continued their enterprise mobile journey with Xamarin.

In the last year or so Mobile development industry is going through another innovation round and frameworks such as Flutter and SwiftUI has caught the attention of many developers. Flutter and SwiftUI has got one thing in common: MVU. MVU aka ELM architecture is specifically made for frontend development. Though its origin is within web development, its well suited for Mobile too. Xamarin has not yet caught up to this innovation round, and I believe it has got another 1 year or so under its belt to show us their new trick!

Wishing all developers a happy new year and another eventful decade.