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  1. Stackups
  2. Application & Data
  3. Frameworks
  4. Cross Platform Mobile Development
  5. Swift vs Xamarin

Swift vs Xamarin

OverviewDecisionsComparisonAlternatives

Overview

Xamarin
Xamarin
Stacks1.3K
Followers1.5K
Votes785
Swift
Swift
Stacks21.9K
Followers13.6K
Votes1.3K

Swift vs Xamarin: What are the differences?

Introduction

Swift and Xamarin are both popular tools used for mobile app development. While Swift is a programming language developed by Apple specifically for iOS, macOS, watchOS, and tvOS app development, Xamarin is a cross-platform framework that allows developers to build apps using C# language. Despite their similarities in enabling cross-platform app development, there are some key differences between Swift and Xamarin.

  1. Language and Development Environment: The major difference between Swift and Xamarin lies in the choice of programming language and development environment. Swift uses the Swift programming language and Xcode IDE, which are both developed and maintained by Apple. On the other hand, Xamarin uses C# as the programming language and supports development in Visual Studio, a popular IDE developed by Microsoft.

  2. Platform-Specific UI Design: Swift, being a native iOS development language, allows developers to leverage the full range of iOS-specific design elements and functionality for building user interfaces. This includes access to all the native UI components, animations, and gestures offered by iOS. In contrast, Xamarin uses a cross-platform UI toolkit called Xamarin.Forms that allows developers to create shared UI code across multiple platforms. While Xamarin.Forms simplifies cross-platform development, it may not offer the same level of control and customization as Swift for iOS-specific UI design.

  3. Performance: Another crucial difference is the performance of the apps built with Swift and Xamarin. Since Swift is a native development language for iOS, it can take full advantage of the underlying hardware and operating system, resulting in highly optimized and performant apps. Xamarin, being a cross-platform framework, relies on a layer of abstraction and additional runtime, which may introduce a slight performance overhead compared to native apps built with Swift.

  4. Community and Ecosystem: Swift has gained significant popularity since its introduction in 2014, with a large and vibrant developer community. This means a wealth of resources, libraries, frameworks, and documentation are available for Swift development. Conversely, while Xamarin also has a supportive community, it may not be as extensive as the Swift community. However, being part of Microsoft's ecosystem, Xamarin benefits from integration with other Microsoft tools and services.

  5. Development Speed and Code Sharing: When it comes to development speed and code sharing, Xamarin has an advantage. Since Xamarin uses C# as the programming language, developers with experience in .NET can leverage their existing skills and reuse code across platforms. This reduces development time and effort, making Xamarin an appealing choice for projects that require rapid development and code sharing between different platforms. Swift, on the other hand, being a language specifically designed for Apple platforms, may require more platform-specific code and development efforts.

  6. Market Reach: Finally, a significant difference lies in the market reach of the apps developed with Swift and Xamarin. Swift is primarily focused on Apple's ecosystem, which includes iOS, macOS, watchOS, and tvOS. This means apps built with Swift are limited to these platforms. In contrast, Xamarin allows developers to target a wider range of platforms, including iOS, Android, macOS, Windows, and more. Consequently, Xamarin offers a broader market reach for apps developed using the framework.

In summary, Swift and Xamarin differ in their choice of programming language and development environment, platform-specific UI design capabilities, performance, community and ecosystem support, development speed and code sharing capabilities, and market reach. Whether you choose Swift or Xamarin depends on your specific requirements, target platforms, and development preferences.

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Advice on Xamarin, Swift

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.

124 views124
Comments

Detailed Comparison

Xamarin
Xamarin
Swift
Swift

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.

Writing code is interactive and fun, the syntax is concise yet expressive, and apps run lightning-fast. Swift is ready for your next iOS and OS X project — or for addition into your current app — because Swift code works side-by-side with Objective-C.

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
21.9K
Followers
1.5K
Followers
13.6K
Votes
785
Votes
1.3K
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
  • 259
    Ios
  • 180
    Elegant
  • 126
    Not Objective-C
  • 107
    Backed by apple
  • 93
    Type inference
Cons
  • 6
    Must own a mac
  • 2
    Memory leaks are not uncommon
  • 1
    Very irritatingly picky about things that’s
  • 1
    Complicated process for exporting modules
  • 1
    Is a lot more effort than lua to make simple functions
Integrations
No integrations available
Cocoa Touch (iOS)
Cocoa Touch (iOS)

What are some alternatives to Xamarin, Swift?

JavaScript

JavaScript

JavaScript is most known as the scripting language for Web pages, but used in many non-browser environments as well such as node.js or Apache CouchDB. It is a prototype-based, multi-paradigm scripting language that is dynamic,and supports object-oriented, imperative, and functional programming styles.

Python

Python

Python is a general purpose programming language created by Guido Van Rossum. Python is most praised for its elegant syntax and readable code, if you are just beginning your programming career python suits you best.

PHP

PHP

Fast, flexible and pragmatic, PHP powers everything from your blog to the most popular websites in the world.

Ruby

Ruby

Ruby is a language of careful balance. Its creator, Yukihiro “Matz” Matsumoto, blended parts of his favorite languages (Perl, Smalltalk, Eiffel, Ada, and Lisp) to form a new language that balanced functional programming with imperative programming.

Java

Java

Java is a programming language and computing platform first released by Sun Microsystems in 1995. There are lots of applications and websites that will not work unless you have Java installed, and more are created every day. Java is fast, secure, and reliable. From laptops to datacenters, game consoles to scientific supercomputers, cell phones to the Internet, Java is everywhere!

Golang

Golang

Go is expressive, concise, clean, and efficient. Its concurrency mechanisms make it easy to write programs that get the most out of multicore and networked machines, while its novel type system enables flexible and modular program construction. Go compiles quickly to machine code yet has the convenience of garbage collection and the power of run-time reflection. It's a fast, statically typed, compiled language that feels like a dynamically typed, interpreted language.

HTML5

HTML5

HTML5 is a core technology markup language of the Internet used for structuring and presenting content for the World Wide Web. As of October 2014 this is the final and complete fifth revision of the HTML standard of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). The previous version, HTML 4, was standardised in 1997.

C#

C#

C# (pronounced "See Sharp") is a simple, modern, object-oriented, and type-safe programming language. C# has its roots in the C family of languages and will be immediately familiar to C, C++, Java, and JavaScript programmers.

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.

Scala

Scala

Scala is an acronym for “Scalable Language”. This means that Scala grows with you. You can play with it by typing one-line expressions and observing the results. But you can also rely on it for large mission critical systems, as many companies, including Twitter, LinkedIn, or Intel do. To some, Scala feels like a scripting language. Its syntax is concise and low ceremony; its types get out of the way because the compiler can infer them.

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