Many companies are currently involved in the development of mobile applications. To reach as many users as possible, there must be support for several platforms. Android and iOS are the largest of these. To create an application for every platform develop and maintain, costs can run high. That is why many companies do research into how these costs can be reduced.

The purpose of this study is to find out if Xamarin is a suitable solution for QNH Consulting to develop cross-platform applications. Here is the following main question: “To what extent is Xamarin suitable for QNH Consulting to develop platform applications that run on Android, iOS and Windows?”

To answer this question, literature and empirical research have been done on the theory and practice of Xamarin. A comparison has been made with a similar one framework called React Native.

From the different chapters we can conclude that Xamarin is suitable for QNH Consulting to use Xamarin for projects in a number of cases. The reasons for this to be:

  • Cross-platform development has the advantage that in the development time of 1 normal application, multiple platforms are supported simultaneously.
  • Xamarin combines the benefits of native and hybrid. The benefits of being native APIs, native UI and performance occur together with hybrid development multiple platforms.
  • There are frameworks that offer a similar solution to Xamarin. However Xamarin’s approach is unique.
  • Xamarin offers various options with native and forms. This increases the employability.
  • In addition to mobile platforms, it is also possible to develop for desktop.

The research has also shown that DevOps is good support for it developing applications with Xamarin. This is because:

  • QNH Consulting wants to start with Xamarin, so it can implement from the same a number of DevOps principles can be implemented
  • QNH Consulting invests in Scrum. DevOps could be a logical next step to be.
  • DevOps is a common trend. You can do this by gaining more knowledge also be applied to customers.
  • With Xamarin, Microsoft is also betting on DevOps with environments such as Mobile Center and Team Services.

However, it is important to conclude from these results that while Xamarin is in the current market is a strong candidate, other solutions must always be looked at perhaps better fit the project. Cross-platform development frameworks are coming and go at a rapid pace while the native development approach remains in place for the time being.