Is it just me who thinks cross platform dev is broken? Microsoft recently announced the end of Xamarin.Forms. It will get deprecated one year after .NET 6’s release. We offer an app, that is based on X.F and is used by very few clients. We don’t even sell that app to new customers anymore. However, I need a solution for my legacy clients. So I just sat down to test some cross platforms app dev frameworks. Let’s recap: (1) MAUI preview: didn’t see a chance to get it up and running with Visual Studio 2022 Enterprise. Following, MS just deprecated Xamarin.Forms, why should I trust in MAUI? (2) ionic: Settled down for two days to get into the framework. Got an MVP up and running, just to install it onto my phones for testing. And it failed. Googling around just gave me several bug reports. Others complaining about the same issues I got into. Interesting to mention, the bugs were reported over the last few years. So why should I trust into a framework, that just does not work? (3) Flutter3: Dart seems like a very neat language. However, besides all the languages I’m programming on a daily bases, I really don’t have time to learn another language on top of Flutter. (4) React.Native: it’s just like learning Dart. I don’t have time to learn another big framework just for a legacy app. Also I’m fearing to experience all the issues, I had with ionic. So, what options do I have? Right: Going for a native WebView based app, one for iOS, another one for Android. I’ve messed around with so many damned, not working frameworks, that I just forgot about the basics. So, it took me one day to develop a web-app by focusing on small screens, known languages and frameworks. Followed by another 4 hours to set up native apps. Both apps are now in review. Jobs done. I never touched Kotlin or Swing before, just like Xcode or Android Studio. As long as I remember, all years certificate issuing for Xamarin.iOS even took me 4 hours. I’m just so glad to see, how well Xcode and Android Studio handles all the signing, just like the development, testing and deployment. Hope to see some good discussions on cross platform app development here. Maybe you could share similar stories with different solutions? |