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Comment by alexkavon | Hacker News Reader

> I sympathize with cross-platform development woes (we have this problem too) but I can't say I've ever been impressed with a cross-platform app developed using React Native (or anything else cross-platform).

Do you feel the same way about Xamarin? I'm just curious as I've been considering moving to it. My company has been developing on Ionic the past year or so and it's become quite cumbersome as a platform. Basic apps look alright in Ionic, but is plagued by web view problems, making a non believer in the platform. Xamarin seems to compile better and avoid the web view. I guess I'm just looking for opinions.

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Any 3rd party solution will have some issues. Whenever you see mostly positive testimonials, you should be both suspicious and scared, because it means you will be the one to find those issues in production, and you won't find any help on the internet.

That was a long time the case for Xamarin, but if you look at their customer forums, reddit, stackoverflow etc you will find the negatives too nowadays.

I am not interested in .NET, so I would not personally use Xamarin anyway, but I know that with Qt for instance you have to be careful with mobile UIs - it's best used for custom stuff and not native-looking apps.

I use Xamarin regularly, and it's true the primary downside is frequent bugs and regressions along the entire toolchain, and in the Xamarin wrappers of native APIs. That said, it's improved by leaps and bounds in since last Summer. It's gone from "I'm about to dump this platform any day now" to "minor nuisance", and most of the time you can just get on with your work.

I second the regression issue. Particularly if you use Xamarin.Forms. The Forms navigation stack is full of memory leaks as well.

For the record, I use Xamarin "classic" and not forms, and my comment was in reference to that. Given the age of X.Forms, what you say sounds par for the course.

If you are comfortable with C++, a good option is to place as much as possible in C++ and then use Objective-C++, JNI and C++/CX to integrate with the native UIs from iOS, Android and WP.

Although Android is going to give you most headaches of those three, as the NDK is pretty anemic and JNI is not that friendly, but with help of JUCE and Djinni the pain isn't that hard.

The advantage is that you get to write a portable application without extra third party layers and have full support of the available SDK tooling for debugging issues.

You realize that React Native also avoids the web view, right? Its more like Xamarin-for-JS with a ui kit built in.

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