.NET MAUI Release Candidate Announced

If you know WPF or UWP the differences in Xaml between Xamarin Forms and those frameworks is something you could learn very rapidly. If you use Xamarin Android you get native access also and, for example, can import Java jar files in to your .Net code, so you can utilise stuff intended at the native level in Android. Similar for the iOS integration. Xamarin Forms gives you the mvvm and databinding you know from WPF etc. Maui builds on this and improved the overall offering.

It's basically thr successor to Xamarin Forms - the same technology and concepts updated to .net 6 instead of Mono.

It's still Xaml, still MVVM, still an abstraction on top of native components.

It's only really different in they're supporting more platforms, updating to more modern .net (.net's IServiceProvider instead of Xamarin's DependencyService for DI), and there's some improvements to how the platform specific UI control adapters can be extended.

As for whether it's better? The tooling is greatly improved and it eases some of the pain when writing "renderers". We were finding occasional bugs up until recently, and migrating is somewhat involved as you lose a lot of the old Xamarin package ecosystem.

I’m looking at a Xamarin Forms app I develop commercially as I type this. It targets Android, but could have supported iOS and Windows from the same code base. Most of our non UI code is shared with WPF and Web apps. All of the UI uses Xamarin Forms and SkiaSharp to render custom UI elements. It will be ported to Maui this year and we will be making a Windows, iOS and possibly Mac version.