How does it work?

So now that we have a good understanding of .NET MAUI, you might wonder how this actually works. How does this .NET code eventually end up as a native app with a native UI on different platforms? It’s not magic, but to understand how it works, we need to take a look under the hood.

Native apps with .NET

At compile time, native apps for each selected platform are being created. The necessary parts of the .NET Base Class Library (BCL), which contains the .NET datatypes, interfaces, and libraries, are embedded in the native app and tailored to the target platform. The BCL relies on the .NET runtime to create an execution environment for your application code. For Android, iOS, and macOS platforms, the Mono runtime serves as the .NET runtime implementation that powers the execution environment. Meanwhile, on Windows, .NET CoreCLR is responsible for providing the runtime environment for your application.

This mechanism isn’t specific to .NET MAUI...