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  5. Avalonia vs Xamarin

Avalonia vs Xamarin

OverviewDecisionsComparisonAlternatives

Overview

Xamarin
Xamarin
Stacks1.3K
Followers1.5K
Votes785
Avalonia
Avalonia
Stacks27
Followers113
Votes0
GitHub Stars29.1K
Forks2.5K

Avalonia vs Xamarin: What are the differences?

Key Differences between Avalonia and Xamarin

1. Language and Platform Support: Avalonia is primarily built using C# and supports platforms like Windows, macOS, and Linux. On the other hand, Xamarin uses C# and allows developers to create cross-platform applications for iOS, Android, and Windows.

2. UI Framework and Design: Avalonia is based on XAML (eXtensible Markup Language), similar to Microsoft's WPF and Silverlight. It provides a rich set of UI controls and allows for a declarative UI design approach. Xamarin, on the other hand, uses native UI controls specific to each platform, providing a more platform-specific look and feel.

3. Development and Tooling: Avalonia relies on cross-platform development tools like Visual Studio Code, which works well for web developers who are familiar with web technologies. Xamarin, on the other hand, integrates with Visual Studio, providing a more feature-rich development environment and a wide range of debugging tools.

4. Code Sharing and Reusability: Avalonia allows code sharing between different platforms, enabling developers to write a single codebase and deploy it on multiple operating systems. Xamarin takes a similar approach, allowing developers to share a considerable amount of code between iOS, Android, and Windows platforms.

5. Performance and Native Experience: Avalonia focuses on delivering a performant and native-like experience, providing hardware-accelerated rendering and support for GPU acceleration. Xamarin, on the other hand, leverages the native APIs and performance optimizations specific to each platform, ensuring a more seamless and native user experience.

6. Community and Ecosystem: Avalonia is an open-source project with a growing community support and a variety of third-party libraries and tooling available. Xamarin, backed by Microsoft, has a large and vibrant community, extensive documentation, and a wide range of official and third-party libraries and plugins to enhance development capabilities.

In Summary, Avalonia and Xamarin differ in their language and platform support, UI framework and design, development and tooling, code sharing and reusability, performance and native experience, as well as community and ecosystem.

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Advice on Xamarin, Avalonia

Ru_Co
Ru_Co

Sep 9, 2020

Review

Hi Manish,

Well between those 2 options (Kotlin and Flutter), Flutter would be the only one that would allow you to make your app for both Apple and Android. Kotlin is for Android only. But there are other crossplatform development frameworks besides Flutter. Which one is the best for you would depend on the app you want to create and your current expertises and preferences. I've marked a few alternatives in my answer.

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Comments

Detailed Comparison

Xamarin
Xamarin
Avalonia
Avalonia

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.

Avalonia is a multi-platform windowing toolkit - somewhat like WPF - that is intended to be multi- platform. It supports XAML, lookless controls and a flexible styling system, and runs on Windows using Direct2D and other operating systems using Gtk & Cairo.

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.
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Statistics
GitHub Stars
-
GitHub Stars
29.1K
GitHub Forks
-
GitHub Forks
2.5K
Stacks
1.3K
Stacks
27
Followers
1.5K
Followers
113
Votes
785
Votes
0
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
No community feedback yet
Integrations
No integrations available
.NET
.NET

What are some alternatives to Xamarin, Avalonia?

Bootstrap

Bootstrap

Bootstrap is the most popular HTML, CSS, and JS framework for developing responsive, mobile first projects on the web.

Ionic

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.

Flutter

Flutter

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

React Native

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.

Foundation

Foundation

Foundation is the most advanced responsive front-end framework in the world. You can quickly prototype and build sites or apps that work on any kind of device with Foundation, which includes layout constructs (like a fully responsive grid), elements and best practices.

Semantic UI

Semantic UI

Semantic empowers designers and developers by creating a shared vocabulary for UI.

Materialize

Materialize

A CSS Framework based on material design.

Material Design for Angular

Material Design for Angular

Material Design is a specification for a unified system of visual, motion, and interaction design that adapts across different devices. Our goal is to deliver a lean, lightweight set of AngularJS-native UI elements that implement the material design system for use in Angular SPAs.

NativeScript

NativeScript

NativeScript enables developers to build native apps for iOS, Android and Windows Universal while sharing the application code across the platforms. When building the application UI, developers use our libraries, which abstract the differences between the native platforms.

Material-UI

Material-UI

Material UI is a library of React UI components that implements Google's Material Design.

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