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Comment by pjmlp | Hacker News Reader

Xamarin.Forms apparently has some stability issues on the Mac.

In any case, MAUI is Xamarin.Forms extended to the desktop, the name changed for marketing purposes.

We've been using Xamarin Forms on the (UWP) desktop for a few years now. It's pretty great. There are bugs yes, but so do all these magic cross-platform UI frameworks. They're investing heavily into MAUI to fix a lot of these things.

Great has not been my experience with forms UWP. Lots and lots of bugs in the UWP components forces you to abandon most of the things you need to make a nice iOS/Android UI.

Unless you’re prototyping or really don’t care at all about UX I don’t see why you wouldn’t write the UI in the native framework. And if you don’t care at all about UX then HTML+CSS+JS is probably a better choice.

We've been working on our Xamarin Forms based product since the first beta in 2014. We released to Android first. Then in 2018 we built a UWP variant of our app. This process barely took a week if I don't include the technical debt that took an extra week to sort out. Then in 2019 we built an iOS variant of our app too - again barely taking a week to do so.

Xamarin Forms let us build 4 years worth of tech for Android only. And then, when we had time and the customer demand to do so, with a small amount of work - port our app to 2 other platforms in fairly short order.

I don't know of any other platform that could do this - particularly when considering the years involved.

Our app uses local databases on the device - so a web based app would not have cut it. And our app has roots in 2014 tech when many possible alternate approaches did not exist yet.

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