You should now feel a bit more comfortable about what Xamarin is and how Xamarin.Forms relates to Xamarin itself.
In this chapter, we established a definition of what a native app is and saw how it has a native UI, native performance, and native API access. We talked about how Xamarin is based on Mono, which is an open source implementation of the .NET framework, and discussed how, at its core, Xamarin is a set of bindings to platform-specific APIs. We then looked at how Xamarin.iOS and Xamarin.Android work under the hood.
After that, we began to touch on the core topic of this book, which is Xamarin.Forms. We started off with an overview of how platform-agnostic controls are rendered to platform-specific controls and how to use XAML to define a hierarchy of controls to assemble a page. We then spent some time looking at the difference between a Xamarin.Forms app and a traditional Xamarin app.
A traditional Xamarin app uses platform-specific APIs directly, without any abstraction...
