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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.
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.