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  1. Stackups
  2. Application & Data
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  4. Cross Platform Mobile Development
  5. Visual Studio App Center vs Xamarin

Visual Studio App Center vs Xamarin

OverviewComparisonAlternatives

Overview

Xamarin
Xamarin
Stacks1.3K
Followers1.5K
Votes785
Visual Studio App Center
Visual Studio App Center
Stacks113
Followers232
Votes4

Visual Studio App Center vs Xamarin: What are the differences?

Visual Studio App Center: Continuous everything – Build, Tes, Deploy, Engage, Repeat. Automate the lifecycle of your iOS, Android, Windows, and macOS apps. Connect your repo and within minutes build in the cloud, test on thousands of real devices, distribute to beta testers and app stores, and monitor real-world usage with crash and analytics data. All in one place; 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.

Visual Studio App Center belongs to "Continuous Integration" category of the tech stack, while Xamarin can be primarily classified under "Cross-Platform Mobile Development".

Some of the features offered by Visual Studio App Center are:

  • Build
  • Test
  • Distribute

On the other hand, Xamarin provides the following key features:

  • 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.

Olo, Crowdkeep, and GoFormz are some of the popular companies that use Xamarin, whereas Visual Studio App Center is used by Partipost, Lykon GmbH, and BeachBody. Xamarin has a broader approval, being mentioned in 105 company stacks & 432 developers stacks; compared to Visual Studio App Center, which is listed in 4 company stacks and 4 developer stacks.

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Detailed Comparison

Xamarin
Xamarin
Visual Studio App Center
Visual Studio App Center

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.

Automate the lifecycle of your iOS, Android, Windows, and macOS apps. Connect your repo and within minutes build in the cloud, test on thousands of real devices, distribute to beta testers and app stores, and monitor real-world usage with crash and analytics data. All in one place.

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.
Build; Test; Distribute; Crashes; Diagnostics; Analytics; Push; CD/CI;
Statistics
Stacks
1.3K
Stacks
113
Followers
1.5K
Followers
232
Votes
785
Votes
4
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
    Scalability
  • 3
    Complexity
Pros
  • 1
    Bug tracking integration
  • 1
    Show error issues for mobile devices
  • 1
    Slack integration
  • 1
    For Mobile apps diagnostics and tracking
Integrations
No integrations available
GitHub
GitHub
Bitbucket
Bitbucket
Azure DevOps
Azure DevOps
Slack
Slack

What are some alternatives to Xamarin, Visual Studio App Center?

Jenkins

Jenkins

In a nutshell Jenkins CI is the leading open-source continuous integration server. Built with Java, it provides over 300 plugins to support building and testing virtually any project.

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.

Travis CI

Travis CI

Free for open source projects, our CI environment provides multiple runtimes (e.g. Node.js or PHP versions), data stores and so on. Because of this, hosting your project on travis-ci.com means you can effortlessly test your library or applications against multiple runtimes and data stores without even having all of them installed locally.

Codeship

Codeship

Codeship runs your automated tests and configured deployment when you push to your repository. It takes care of managing and scaling the infrastructure so that you are able to test and release more frequently and get faster feedback for building the product your users need.

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.

CircleCI

CircleCI

Continuous integration and delivery platform helps software teams rapidly release code with confidence by automating the build, test, and deploy process. Offers a modern software development platform that lets teams ramp.

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.

TeamCity

TeamCity

TeamCity is a user-friendly continuous integration (CI) server for professional developers, build engineers, and DevOps. It is trivial to setup and absolutely free for small teams and open source projects.

Drone.io

Drone.io

Drone is a hosted continuous integration service. It enables you to conveniently set up projects to automatically build, test, and deploy as you make changes to your code. Drone integrates seamlessly with Github, Bitbucket and Google Code as well as third party services such as Heroku, Dotcloud, Google AppEngine and more.

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