Xamarin vs Android SDK Comparison | StackShare

Overview

Xamarin

Stacks1.3K

Followers1.5K

Votes785

Android SDK

Stacks27.4K

Followers20.7K

Votes800

Android SDK vs Xamarin: What are the differences?

Android SDK: An SDK that provides you the API libraries and developer tools necessary to build, test, and debug apps for Android. Android provides a rich application framework that allows you to build innovative apps and games for mobile devices in a Java language environment; Xamarin: Create iOS, Android and Mac apps in C#. Xamarin’s Mono-based products enable .NET developers to use their existing code, libraries and tools (including Visual Studio*), as well as skills in .NET and the C# programming language, to create mobile applications for the industry’s most widely-used mobile devices, including Android-based smartphones and tablets, iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch.

Android SDK and Xamarin are primarily classified as "Frameworks (Full Stack)" and "Cross-Platform Mobile Development" tools respectively.

"Android development", "Necessary for android" and "Android studio" are the key factors why developers consider Android SDK; whereas "Power of c# on mobile devices", "Native apps with native ui controls" and "Native performance" are the primary reasons why Xamarin is favored.

Google, 9GAG, and Asana are some of the popular companies that use Android SDK, whereas Xamarin is used by Rdio, Olo, and Rumble. Android SDK has a broader approval, being mentioned in 1071 company stacks & 878 developers stacks; compared to Xamarin, which is listed in 74 company stacks and 65 developer stacks.

Advice on Xamarin, Android SDK

Omran

CTO & Co-founder at Bonton Connect

Jun 19, 2020

Needs adviceon

Kotlin

We actually initially wrote a lot of networking code in Kotlin but the complexities involved prompted us to try and compile NodeJS for Android and port over all the networking logic to Node and communicate with node over the Java Native Interface.

This turned out to be a great decision considering our battery usage fell by 40% and rate of development increased by a factor of 2.

622k views622k

Comments

Detailed Comparison

Xamarin	Android SDK
Xamarin’s Mono-based products enable .NET developers to use their existing code, libraries and tools (including Visual Studio*), as well as skills in .NET and the C# programming language, to create mobile applications for the industry’s most widely-used mobile devices, including Android-based smartphones and tablets, iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch.	Android provides a rich application framework that allows you to build innovative apps and games for mobile devices in a Java language environment.
Cross-platform development- Thinking about supporting iOS, Android, Mac and Windows? Xamarin allows you to write it all in C#.;Reuse existing code- Use your favorite .NET libraries in Xamarin apps. Easily use third-party native libraries and frameworks.; Discover as you type- Explore APIs as you type with code autocompletion.;Visual Studio or Xamarin Studio- Create, build, debug, and deploy apps in Visual Studio. Or use Xamarin Studio, a fully-featured IDE that is built for mobile app development.;Native UI, Native Performance- Xamarin delivers high performance compiled code with full access to all the native APIs so you can create native apps with device-specific experiences.; Point and Click UI Design- Xamarin provides a world class Android UI designer. Use Apple Xcode UI designer to create interfaces and Storyboards that automatically sync with your Xamarin.iOS project.	-
Statistics
Stacks 1.3K	Stacks 27.4K
Followers 1.5K	Followers 20.7K
Votes 785	Votes 800
Pros & Cons
Pros 121 Power of c# on mobile devices 81 Native performance 79 Native apps with native ui controls 73 No javascript - truely compiled code 67 Sharing more than 90% of code over all platforms Cons 9 Build times 5 Visual Studio 4 Price 3 Complexity 3 Scalability	Pros 289 Android development 156 Necessary for android 128 Android studio 86 Mobile framework 82 Backed by google
Integrations
No integrations available	Java

What are some alternatives to Xamarin, Android SDK?

Node.js

Node.js uses an event-driven, non-blocking I/O model that makes it lightweight and efficient, perfect for data-intensive real-time applications that run across distributed devices.

Rails

Rails is a web-application framework that includes everything needed to create database-backed web applications according to the Model-View-Controller (MVC) pattern.

Django

Django is a high-level Python Web framework that encourages rapid development and clean, pragmatic design.

Laravel

It is a web application framework with expressive, elegant syntax. It attempts to take the pain out of development by easing common tasks used in the majority of web projects, such as authentication, routing, sessions, and caching.

.NET

.NET is a general purpose development platform. With .NET, you can use multiple languages, editors, and libraries to build native applications for web, mobile, desktop, gaming, and IoT for Windows, macOS, Linux, Android, and more.

Ionic

Free and open source, Ionic offers a library of mobile and desktop-optimized HTML, CSS and JS components for building highly interactive apps. Use with Angular, React, Vue, or plain JavaScript.

ASP.NET Core

A free and open-source web framework, and higher performance than ASP.NET, developed by Microsoft and the community. It is a modular framework that runs on both the full .NET Framework, on Windows, and the cross-platform .NET Core.

Flutter

Flutter is a mobile app SDK to help developers and designers build modern mobile apps for iOS and Android.

React Native

React Native enables you to build world-class application experiences on native platforms using a consistent developer experience based on JavaScript and React. The focus of React Native is on developer efficiency across all the platforms you care about - learn once, write anywhere. Facebook uses React Native in multiple production apps and will continue investing in React Native.