Understanding the Xamarin mobile platform

The Xamarin platform is essentially a framework that enables developers to develop cross-platform mobile applications, using either the C# or F# programming languages, as well as a runtime that runs on the Android, iOS, and Windows platforms, giving you an app that looks, feels, and behaves completely native.

In this section, we will gain an understanding of what the Xamarin mobile platform is and the benefits of using Xamarin to develop your iOS, Android, and Windows apps.

Benefits of developing apps using the Xamarin mobile platform

When you use the Xamarin platform to build your mobile apps, you'll have access to all of the features available in the native SDK and you can even use your existing APIs, so that these can be shared across each of the different mobile platforms for iOS, Android, and Windows.

That said, anything you can do in Objective-C, Swift, or Java can be done in C# or F#, with Xamarin and Visual Studio for Mac.

Developing native apps using the Xamarin approach

When considering developing native iOS, Android, or Windows apps, most developers would either choose to use Objective-C, Swift, or Java. However, there are more ways to build performant and user-friendly mobile apps and Xamarin is one of them. Let's take a look at the benefits of developing native apps using Xamarin.

The Xamarin platform uses a single programming language, C# or F#, which can be used to create apps for the iOS, Android, and Windows platforms, as well as providing you with the flexibility of writing C# code so that you can design your user interfaces specifically for each platform.

The C# programming language is a mature language that is strongly typed to prevent code from producing unexpected behavior. Since C# is one of the .NET framework languages, it can be used with a number of useful .NET features, such as Lambdas, LINQ, and asynchronous programming. The C# source code that you write is then compiled into a native app for each platform.

Technically speaking, Xamarin uses C# and native libraries wrapped in the .NET layer for cross-platform app development. Such applications are often compared to native ones for both iOS and Android mobile development platforms in terms of performance and user experience:

Developing native apps using the Xamarin approach

As you can see from the preceding screenshot, this shows each platform for the Xamarin.iOS, Xamarin.Android, and Windows platforms, each containing their own platform-specific UI code layer and a common Shared C# Backend containing the business logic, which can be shared across all platforms.

Developing apps using the Xamarin.Forms approach

Developing iOS, Android, or Windows apps using the Xamarin.Forms approach is very different from developing apps using the native approach. Let's take a look at the benefits of developing apps using the Xamarin.Forms approach.

The Xamarin.Forms approach allows you to build your user interfaces, which can then be shared across each of the different mobile development platforms using 100% percent shared C# or F# code.

Using the Xamarin.Forms approach means that your applications will have access to over 40 user interface controls and layouts, which are then mapped to each of the native controls specific to the platform at runtime:

Developing apps using the Xamarin.Forms approach

As you can see from the preceding screenshot, each platform for the Xamarin.iOS, Xamarin.Android, and Windows platforms shares common user interface code, which will be rendered differently on each platform, as well as a common Shared C# Backend containing the business logic that can be shared across all platforms.

Now that you have a good understanding of developing Xamarin apps using the native approach versus developing apps using the Xamarin.Forms approach, we can start to build our first app, which we will be covering in the next section.