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Comment by pjmlp | Hacker News Reader

MAUI is Xamarin rebranded.

Even with its half broken implementations, .NET and Java are still the best options in tooling and managed runtime capabilities.

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And it will be crap. What I want, and I'm sure a lot of other devs interested in making C# GUI multi-platform apps, is an UI framework à la Flutter that display the same thing everywhere. In the days of Electron apps not having a native look and feel is not a really problem anymore.

The saddest thing is that Microsoft actually offered that years before: Silverlight Out-of-Browser applications, that where running the same on Windows and Mac OS.

There are rumours of a Flutter back-end coming for Xamarin.Forms/MAUI. Or possibly a something lower level in Windows itself (which a MAUI back-end could tap into).

Electron is just a phase like Active Desktop and XUL, its time is coming to pass in this fashion driven industry.

Flutter is Dart Rails, the last hope to save Dart.

Silverlight was good for it's time but nowadays I would rather code in whatever popular JS/HTML framework - the live reload beats any C# flow hands down in iteration time and the fact that I can just reverse proxy my local dev env while working on something to a designer speeds up design tweaks a bunch.

Or just use OpenSilver, thanks WebAssembly.

https://opensilver.net/

That sounds like it would make the development iteration even more terrible than it was - WASM builds were slooow last time I tried it - with webpack in HMR mode or flutter you get instant feedback - this is probably the biggest productivity boost in UI development - I've yet to see anything from .NET offer similar performance, I suspect it would be challenging due to the static nature of IL.

What you’ve just described is absolutely the opposite of what I want.

Mobile apps have very different requirements than desktop apps, not least as the metaphors are wildly different.

macOS, Windows and X all have fairly similar window layouts and behaviours.

iOS and Android have sharply different layouts and behaviours. Yeah there’s a bit of overlap now, but even navigation is different.

If it was just marketing name change, it would be available now. Their current timeline has the first production release in late 2021!

It cannot be available now, because Xamarin doesn't support all backends that MAUI should support, nor does it run properly on .NET 5 yet.

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