The IT world is rapidly changing with the recent technologies precisely focusing on mobility. Mobile applications available on smartphones have become vastly more complicated and demanding compared to a decade ago when the applications were still in infancy. According to Gartner Inc., smartphone sales reached 2.1 billion units by the end of 2019, which has increased the demand for mobile applications that cater to high performance and usability. Thus, mobility has become a top priority for businesses engaged in software development, while targeting the application development for major platforms since this would add to the branding and profits for the organization.
At the same time, since cost and time are a significant factor, the native implementation for platforms is still a challenge that needs to be addressed. The cost for mobile app development is directly proportional to the number of platforms in case of native development, in addition to the cost of hiring necessary resources who will develop for the platform. Also, once the application is launched in the marketplace, the support and maintenance costs go up since they require different skill-sets for different applications.
Because of the reasons mentioned above, businesses are looking to switch to a simpler, faster, and overall better way to build these applications. Cross-platform development frameworks like Xamarin are now being used to save on the cost and development time.
Xamarin helps in reducing overall development cost in the following ways:
Native User Interfaces and API Integration:
Developers get to combine the same UI controls and APIs that are used for developing native mobile applications in their respective platform-specific programming languages.
Shared Codebase:
The development process will require substantially reduced resources and time. Backend enterprise integration and database interactions need to be coded only once in C#. This leads to more than 75% of the entire codebase to be shared across multiple platforms. This reduces the number of bugs introduced during the development process as well as saves a good amount of time.
Easy Maintenance:
Developers can deploy changes to the source code for all platforms in one go in case of any changes required. The maintenance cost is also drastically reduced because of a single code base in C# by taking advantage of existing code, tools, and teams.
Easy to Learn:
Unlike other mobile app development platforms that require diverse programming environments, Xamarin app development only requires one to be well-versed with C# only. Developers can work in Xamarin Studio instead of multiple IDEs, as Xamarin Studio provides all SDKs required to build apps for various platforms.
Minimum Scope for Errors:
Error-checking can be taken to a whole another level of accuracy since automatic testing of applications can be done using Xamarin Test Cloud. In addition to this, after the launch of the application, Xamarin Insights can be used to analyze and track the usage patterns and performance that signify trends and raise alerts about sudden crashes (if any) and also on how the users respond to the applications. These accurate statistics allow to track behavior patterns with previous versions of the mobile app and thus build customized, brand new versions based on the derived insights.
Time-to-market is reduced:
Time spent on translating code, rewriting, and recompiling for different operating systems is eliminated. The new features are ready for deployment for all platforms in a single step and don’t need to trickle-down from most used OS to the least used OS.
Famous Applications that leveraged Xamarin to reduce development costs:
Transistor – Supergiant Games
The game was initially developed for PC and Xbox but now has a Xamarin based mobile application as well. Game development is well known to be an extremely money-intensive process, and Supergiant Games has leveraged Xamarin in order to reduce this cost.
Skulls of the Shogun
Another popular game that leverages Xamarin’s cost-cutting benefits to be playable across multiple platforms and consoles.
Insightly – A comprehensive Project Management and CRM Application
Insightly is targeted for businesses operating in different verticals and is a one-stop solution. This business-centric application is powered by Xamarin and is compatible with iOS and Android .
The World Bank Survey App – for Global Surveys
To conduct surveys on a global scale and collate information from respondents on tablets, the World Bank used Xamarin for their use-case. The application also caters to data confidentiality which has become a major concern for consumers in this day and age.
Conclusion
Since the cost of development has always been the major concern for companies looking to get into mobile application development, Xamarin proves to be one of the most established and useful frameworks to achieve their goals. At Algoworks, we make sure to understand the business requirements of our clients and if Xamarin serves these requirements well and at the same time reduces the cost of development, our Xamarin team can easily take care of that. To know more about our Xamarin app development services, contact us here!
References: MobileAppDaily, Medium, Clutch, Mobisoft Infotech, Space-O Technologies, Clarion Tech, RedBytes
Rachit Agarwal
