American software company
Xamarin
is a Microsoft-owned
San Francisco
-based software company founded in May 2011
[2]
by the engineers that created
Mono
,
[3]
Xamarin.Android
(formerly Mono for Android) and
Xamarin.iOS
(formerly MonoTouch), which are
cross-platform
implementations of the
Common Language Infrastructure
(CLI) and Common Language Specifications (often called Microsoft .NET).
With a
C#
-shared codebase, developers can use Xamarin tools to write
native
Android
,
iOS
, and
Windows
apps
with native
user interfaces
and share code across multiple platforms, including
Windows
,
macOS
, and
Linux
.
[4]
According to Xamarin, over 1.4 million developers were using Xamarin's products in 120 countries around the world as of April 2017.
[5]
On February 24, 2016, Microsoft announced it had signed a definitive agreement to
acquire
Xamarin.
[6]
Microsoft ended support for Xamarin on May 1, 2024 in favor of
.NET MAUI
[7]
.
History
[
edit
]
Origins in Ximian and Mono
[
edit
]
In 1999
Miguel de Icaza
and
Nat Friedman
launched what eventually became known as
Ximian
to support and develop software for de Icaza's nascent
GNOME
project. After Microsoft first announced their
.NET Framework
in June 2000,
[8]
de Icaza began investigating whether a
Linux
version was feasible.
[9]
The
Mono
open source project was launched on July 19, 2001. Ximian was bought by
Novell
on August 4, 2003, which was then acquired by
Attachmate
in April 2011.
[10]
After the acquisition, Attachmate announced hundreds of layoffs for the Novell workforce, including Mono developers,
[11]
putting the future of Mono in question.
[12]
[13]
Founding Xamarin
[
edit
]
On May 16, 2011, Miguel de Icaza announced on his blog that Mono would be developed and supported by
Xamarin
, a newly formed company that planned to release a new suite of mobile products. According to de Icaza, at least part of the original Mono team had moved to the new company.
The name Xamarin comes from the name of the
Tamarin
monkey, replacing the leading T with an X. This is in line with the naming theme used ever since Xamarin was started.
[14]
After Xamarin was announced, the future of the project was questioned since MonoTouch and Mono for Android would now be in direct competition with the existing commercial offerings owned by Attachmate. It was not known at that time how Xamarin would prove they had not illegally used technologies previously developed when they were employed by Novell for the same work.
[15]
[16]
In July 2011, however, Novell ? now a subsidiary of Attachmate ? and Xamarin announced that Novell had granted a perpetual license to Xamarin for Mono, MonoTouch and Mono for Android, and Xamarin formally and legally took official stewardship of the project.
[17]
[18]
Product development
[
edit
]
In December 2012, Xamarin released Xamarin.Mac,
[19]
a plugin for the existing
MonoDevelop
Integrated development environment
(IDE), which allows developers to build C#-based applications for the Apple's
macOS
operating system and package them for publishing via the
App Store
.
In February 2013, Xamarin announced the release of Xamarin 2.0.
[20]
The release included two main components:
Xamarin Studio
, a re-branding of its open-source IDE Monodevelop;
[21]
and integration with
Visual Studio
, Microsoft's IDE for the .NET Framework, allowing Visual Studio to be used for creating applications for Android, iOS and Windows.
[22]
Funding
[
edit
]
On July 17, 2013, Xamarin announced that they had closed $16 million (~$20.6 million in 2023) in
Series B
funding led by Lead Edge Capital.
[23]
Several investors from their
Series A
funding also participated, including
Charles River Ventures
,
Floodgate
, and Ignition Partners. On August 21, 2014, Xamarin successfully closed an additional $54 million (~$68.5 million in 2023) in Series C funding, which is one of the largest rounds of funding ever raised by a mobile app development platform.
[24]
As of August 2014 the total funding for the company was $82 million (~$104 million in 2023).
[25]
Acquisition
[
edit
]
On February 24, 2016, Xamarin and
Microsoft
announced that Microsoft signed a definitive agreement to acquire Xamarin.
[6]
[26]
[27]
Terms of the deal were not disclosed, though the Wall Street Journal reported the price at between $400 million and $500 million.
[
better source needed
]
Microsoft subsidiary (2016?present)
[
edit
]
At
Microsoft Build
2016 Microsoft announced that they will open-source the Xamarin SDK and that they will bundle it as a free tool within
Microsoft Visual Studio
's integrated development environment,
[28]
and Visual Studio Enterprise users would also get Xamarin's enterprise features free of charge. As a part of the acquisition they would also
relicense
Mono
completely under the
MIT License
and would release all other Xamarin SDK software through the
.NET Foundation
also under the MIT License.
[29]
[30]
Products
[
edit
]
Xamarin platform
[
edit
]
The Xamarin company produces an
open source
[
citation needed
]
software platform by the same name, and Xamarin 2.0 was released in February 2013.
[31]
Xamarin extends the .NET developer platform with tools and libraries specifically for building apps for
Android
,
iOS
,
tvOS
,
watchOS
,
macOS
, and Windows (
UWP
) primarily with C# in Visual Studio. Developers can re-use their existing C# code, and share significant code across device platforms. Several well-known companies including
3M
,
AT&T
, and
HP
[32]
[33]
have used the platform to create their apps. Xamarin integrates with Visual Studio, Microsoft's IDE for the .NET Framework, and subsequently is available for use by macOS users through Visual Studio for Mac.
[21]
Xamarin also released a component store to integrate backend systems, 3rd party libraries, cloud services and UI controls directly into mobile apps.
[34]
[35]
Xamarin.Forms
[
edit
]
Introduced in Xamarin 3 on May 28, 2014, and allows one to use portable controls subsets that are mapped to native controls of Android, iOS and Windows Phone.
[36]
Windows Phone was deprecated and removed in favour of UWP.
It is also possible to target other different platforms such as Tizen (by Samsung), GTK (Linux), WPF and macOS even though they have stayed in Preview.
This system uses XAML. Microsoft has modified this framework to work with the
Universal Windows Platform
.
[37]
Microsoft enables native mobile development with
Blazor
. Mobile Blazor Bindings allow developers to build native Android and iOS using C#, .NET, and web programming patterns.
[38]
.NET MAUI
[
edit
]
At
Microsoft Build 2020
, Microsoft announced that Xamarin.Forms was going to be merged into
.NET 6
as .NET Multi-platform App UI (.NET MAUI).
[39]
.NET MAUI adds macOS support via
Mac Catalyst
.
[40]
[41]
On May 23, 2022, during
Microsoft Build 2022
, .NET MAUI was released.
[42]
Microsoft stated that they will continue supporting Xamarin until it is fully replaced by .NET MAUI in May 2024.
[43]
Xamarin Test Cloud
[
edit
]
Xamarin Test Cloud makes it possible to test mobile apps written in any language on real, non-jailbroken devices in the cloud. Xamarin Test Cloud uses object-based UI testing to simulate real user interactions.
[44]
Xamarin for Visual Studio
[
edit
]
Xamarin is a .NET developer platform made up of tools, programming languages, and libraries for building many different types of applications.
[45]
Xamarin supplies add-ins to Microsoft Visual Studio that allows developers to build Android, iOS, and Windows apps within the IDE using
code completion
and IntelliSense. Xamarin for Visual Studio also has extensions that provide support for the building, deploying, and debugging of apps on a simulator or a device.
[46]
In late 2013, Xamarin and Microsoft announced a partnership that included further technical integration and customer programs to make it possible for their joint developer bases to build for all mobile platforms.
[47]
In addition, Xamarin now includes support for Microsoft Portable Class Libraries
[48]
and most C# 5.0 features such as async/await. CEO and co-founder of Xamarin, Nat Friedman, announced the alliance at the launch of Visual Studio 2013 in New York.
Xamarin is useful in developing iOS and Android apps.
On March 31, 2016, Microsoft announced that they were merging all of Xamarin's software with every version of Microsoft Visual Studio including Visual Studio Community, and this added various Xamarin features to come pre-installed in Visual Studio such as an iOS emulator.
[49]
Xamarin Studio
[
edit
]
At the time of its release in February 2013, Xamarin Studio was a standalone IDE for mobile app development on Windows and macOS,
[21]
as part of Xamarin 2.0 based on the open source project
MonoDevelop
.
[50]
In addition to a debugger, Xamarin Studio includes code completion in C#, an Android UI builder for creating user interfaces without XML, and integration with Xcode Interface Builder for iOS app design.
[50]
[51]
On Windows Xamarin Studio is now deprecated and was replaced with Xamarin for Visual Studio. On
macOS
Xamarin Studio is still in development, but was rebranded in 2016 as
Visual Studio for Mac
.
[52]
Xamarin.Mac
[
edit
]
Xamarin.Mac was created as a tool for Apple technology application development using the C# programming language. Xamarin.Mac, as with Xamarin.iOS and Xamarin.Android, gives developers up to 90% of code reuse across Android, iOS and Windows.
[53]
Xamarin.Mac gives C# developers the ability to build fully native
Cocoa
apps for macOS and allows for native apps that can be put into the Mac App Store.
[54]
[55]
.NET Mobility Scanner
[
edit
]
Xamarin's .NET Mobility Scanner lets developers see how much of their .NET code can run on other operating systems, specifically Android, iOS, Windows Phone, and Windows Store. It is a free web-based service that uses Silverlight.
[56]
RoboVM
[
edit
]
In October 2015 Xamarin announced that they had acquired the Swedish
RoboVM for Java
developer platform akin to its offerings, the reason stated by Xamarin for the acquisition was that if they developed a
Java
-based platform from the ground up, their end product would be similar to RoboVM so they acquired the company instead; as a result RoboVM operates independently of the Xamarin team. RoboVM enables developers to build Java apps for iOS and Android with fully native UIs, native performances, and all Java apps have the complete access to the APIs of each developer platform.
[57]
[58]
In April 2016 Microsoft announced that they would discontinue RoboVM and cease all subscriptions after April 30, 2017.
[59]
BugVM,
[60]
a fork of RoboVM was created to maintain the free open source status.
[61]
Acquisitions
[
edit
]
- In 2013, Xamarin acquired the mobile application testing platform
LessPainful
.
[62]
- In 2015, Xamarin acquired the Java application development platform
RoboVM
.
[63]
References
[
edit
]
- ^
"Announcing Xamarin"
. Miguel de Icaza.
Archived
from the original on May 18, 2011
. Retrieved
May 16,
2011
.
- ^
a
b
Binstock, Andrew (June 11, 2011).
"NET Alternative in Transition"
.
InformationWeek
.
Archived
from the original on December 7, 2011
. Retrieved
March 18,
2012
.
- ^
Miguel de Icaza
(May 16, 2011).
"Miguel de Icaza"
.
Archived
from the original on May 18, 2011
. Retrieved
May 16,
2011
.
- ^
"What is Xamarin?"
.
Archived
from the original on February 27, 2014
. Retrieved
April 1,
2014
.
- ^
"About Xamarin"
.
Archived
from the original on March 17, 2017
. Retrieved
April 23,
2017
.
- ^
a
b
"Microsoft to acquire Xamarin and empower more developers to build apps on any device"
.
Official
Microsoft
Blog
. February 24, 2016.
Archived
from the original on February 24, 2016
. Retrieved
February 24,
2016
.
- ^
"Xamarin official support policy | .NET"
.
Microsoft
. Retrieved
June 5,
2024
.
- ^
"Microsoft sees nothing but .NET ahead"
Archived
November 5, 2011, at the
Wayback Machine
, Steven Bonisteel, ZDNet, June 23, 2000
- ^
"Mono early history"
. Mono-list. October 13, 2003. Archived from
the original
on June 6, 2011
. Retrieved
May 21,
2011
.
- ^
"The Attachmate Group Completes Acquisition of Novell"
. April 27, 2011.
Archived
from the original on April 30, 2014
. Retrieved
April 1,
2014
.
- ^
Koep, Paul (May 2, 2011).
"Employees say hundreds laid off at Novell's Provo office"
.
KSL-TV
.
Archived
from the original on May 5, 2011
. Retrieved
May 7,
2011
.
- ^
J. Vaughan-Nichols, Steven (May 4, 2011).
"Is Mono dead? Is Novell dying?"
.
ZDNet
.
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. Retrieved
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.
- ^
Clarke, Gavin (May 3, 2011).
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.
The Register
.
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. Retrieved
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- ^
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.
Archived
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- ^
"The Death and Rebirth of Mono"
. infoq.com. May 17, 2011.
Archived
from the original on May 21, 2011
. Retrieved
May 29,
2011
.
Even if they aren't supporting it, they do own a product that is in direct competition with Xamarin's future offerings. Without some sort of legal arrangement between Attachmate and Xamarin, the latter would face the daunting prospect of proving that their new development doesn't use any the technology that the old one did. Considering that this is really just a wrapper around the native API, it would be hard to prove you had a clean-room implementation even for a team that wasn't intimately familiar with Attachmate's code.
- ^
Matthew Baxter-Reynolds (July 5, 2011).
"What now for cross-platform mobile C#?"
.
The Guardian
.
Archived
from the original on April 24, 2016
. Retrieved
July 15,
2011
.
But with a total lack of clarity as to whether Novell will allow Xamarin to sell their new products, or whether agreements exist to facilitate such a scenario, we're left in an unpleasant world of not having a compelling or workable solution for compromise free, multi-platform development.
- ^
"SUSE and Xamarin Partner to Accelerate Innovation and Support Mono Customers and Community"
.
Novell
. July 18, 2011.
Archived
from the original on October 17, 2011
. Retrieved
July 18,
2011
.
The agreement grants Xamarin a broad, perpetual license to all intellectual property covering Mono, MonoTouch, Mono for Android and Mono Tools for Visual Studio. Xamarin will also provide technical support to SUSE customers using Mono-based products, and assume stewardship of the Mono open source community project.
- ^
De Icaza, Miguel (July 18, 2011).
"Novell/Xamarin Partnership around Mono"
.
Archived
from the original on July 20, 2011
. Retrieved
July 18,
2011
.
- ^
"Your C# App on 66 Million Macs: Announcing Xamarin.Mac"
. Xamarin. December 12, 2012.
Archived
from the original on July 19, 2013
. Retrieved
July 12,
2013
.
- ^
"Announcing Xamarin 2.0"
. Xamarin. February 20, 2013.
Archived
from the original on June 27, 2013
. Retrieved
July 12,
2013
.
- ^
a
b
c
"Xamarin 2.0 Review"
.
Dr Dobb's Journal
. March 12, 2013.
Archived
from the original on July 2, 2013
. Retrieved
July 12,
2013
.
Xamarin 2.0 bundles the company's Android, iOS and Mac development tools in a single affordable package
- ^
"12 benefits of Xamarin Cross-platform app development"
.
HeadWorks
. March 15, 2019.
- ^
Lardinois, Frederic (July 17, 2013).
"Xamarin Raises $16M Series B Round Led By Lead Edge Capital, Passes 20,000 Paid Developer Seats"
.
TechCrunch
.
Archived
from the original on January 20, 2015
. Retrieved
January 15,
2015
.
- ^
Lardinois, Frederic (August 21, 2014).
"Cross-Platform Development Platform Xamarin Raises $54M Series C"
.
TechCrunch
.
Archived
from the original on January 19, 2015
. Retrieved
January 15,
2015
.
- ^
Kepes, Ben (August 21, 2014).
"Xamarin Raises $54 Million--Because M&A... And Mobile"
.
Forbes
.
Archived
from the original on December 30, 2014
. Retrieved
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2015
.
- ^
"Breaking: Microsoft acquires Xamarin, a leading platform provider for mobile app development"
.
Microsoft PowerUser
. February 24, 2016.
Archived
from the original on February 27, 2016
. Retrieved
February 24,
2016
.
- ^
Greene, Jay (February 24, 2016).
"Microsoft Agrees to Acquire Xamarin Inc. Deal reflects efforts to increase Microsoft software's presence on devices beyond those that run Windows"
.
Wall Street Journal
.
Archived
from the original on February 24, 2016
. Retrieved
February 24,
2016
.
- ^
Taft, Darryl K. (March 31, 2016).
"Microsoft Makes Xamarin free in Visual Studio, Open-Sources SDK"
.
eWeek
.
- ^
Ferraira, Bruno (March 31, 2016).
"Xamarin now comes free with Visual Studio"
.
The Tech Report
.
Archived
from the original on April 2, 2016.
- ^
Frank, Blair Hanley (March 31, 2016).
"Microsoft shows fruits of Xamarin acquisition with Visual Studio integration"
.
PC World
.
Archived
from the original on April 3, 2016.
- ^
"Xamarin delivers tool for building native Mac OS X apps with C#"
.
ZDNet
. December 13, 2012.
Archived
from the original on April 7, 2014
. Retrieved
April 1,
2014
.
- ^
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.
Archived
from the original on April 23, 2014
. Retrieved
April 1,
2014
.
- ^
"Xamarin for iOS"
.
Archived
from the original on March 30, 2014
. Retrieved
April 1,
2014
.
- ^
Peter Bright (February 20, 2013).
"Xamarin 2.0 reviewed: iOS development comes to Visual Studio"
.
Archived
from the original on April 14, 2014
. Retrieved
April 1,
2014
.
- ^
Mikael Ricknas (June 25, 2013).
"Xamarin tool aims to show the ease with which .NET apps can become mobile"
.
Archived
from the original on April 7, 2014
. Retrieved
April 1,
2014
.
- ^
"Announcing Xamarin 3"
.
- ^
"Windows Platform Features - Xamarin"
.
docs.microsoft.com
.
- ^
Krill, Paul (January 14, 2020).
"Microsoft enables native mobile development with Blazor"
.
InfoWorld
. Retrieved
February 6,
2020
.
- ^
"Xamarin Updates From Microsoft Build 2020"
.
Xamarin Blog
. May 19, 2020
. Retrieved
May 28,
2020
.
- ^
"Introducing .NET Multi-platform App UI"
.
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. May 19, 2020
. Retrieved
June 4,
2021
.
- ^
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.
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. Retrieved
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.
- ^
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. May 23, 2022.
- ^
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.
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. Retrieved
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.
- ^
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.
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. Retrieved
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.
- ^
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. November 13, 2013. Archived from
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. Retrieved
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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[
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