Xamarin releases version 4.0 of its cross-platform mobile developer suite

Xamarin has released version 4.0 of its cross-platform mobile suite for iOS, Android and Windows. Xamarin was founded in 2011 by Miguel de Icaza and Nat Friedman, with the goal of enabling developers to build apps for Apple iOS and Google Android using Microsoft's C# language. The technology used is based on Mono, the open …

[CrashM]

Massively overpriced for a small company that wants VS integration, but not "Business Features" or "Email Support". For 2 developers thats $4,000 per year. An MSDN subscription doesn't even cost that much.

[wowfood]

Agreed

I've looked into Xamarin a few times, and every time I get to the end and think "Yup that'll do me... wait, I have to pay HOW MUCH for VS integration?"

Because really that's the only difference I'm seeing as I won't make use of the other two 'features' for business users. And I'm honestly not willing to spend an extra $699 per year just fo rVS integration.

Can't help but think they'd be better off upping indie to $30 a month and including VS integration, and scrapping business whilst lower enterprise to a more reasonable level.

[Heya]

Small business with fewer than 20 employees can get a discounted rate if they inquire. It's written on the store page :P

[CrashM]

It would have to be a HEAVY discount... even a 50% discount would still have a rather extreme price.

[Adam 52]

You're not prepared to pay $1000/year for decent tools? A good IDE, debugger and toolchain make the world of difference to productivity, easily saving that much just by getting more code working first time.

I pay $500/year just for a SQL query tool.

[Anonymous Coward]

Then you're a mug.

[Ilsa Loving]

They're not the only ones

QT is the same way. Student? Sure, go nuts! Open Source? Have as much as you want!

Oh, you wanna make some money? Give us your first born as hostage!

Both Xamarian and QT think that only big companies should be allowed to produce multi-platform applications. I was thinking about writing a cross-platform application. I didn't want to make it open source, but I also under no illusions that I would be able to quit my day job over it either.

QT states (repeatedly) that if you should *consult with a lawyer* as to which license is best for me, and after a great deal of googling, I found out that they want many thousand dollars for a commercial license.

Xamarian, is relatively cheap because they only want a couple thousand for a single freaking license.

And then they scratch their heads and wonder why their market share is crap, and no one takes them seriously. Between things like phonegap for applications (free), and Unreal and Unity ("you can pay us after you've made some money" ) for games, QT and Xamarian look that much more prehistoric.

The only limitation with Phonegap is that they don't yet provide an easy way to create desktop applications, and Unity and Unreal revolve exclusively around games. If Phonegap (or anyone else) puts out a completely cross-platform suite for writing regular applications with reasonable usage terms, QT and Xamarian may as well go bankrupt right then and there. I had hoped that WXWidgets would get there, but for whatever reason their mobile dev appears to have stalled.

I can't tell if these people are being irrationally hostile towards developers, or if they're so full of themselves that they don't remember what reality looks like anymore.

[Yet Another Anonymous coward]

Re: They're not the only ones

Qt is LGPL - you can write closed source commercial apps with it.

You only pay for a commercial lixense if you want to make changes/fixes to the Qt source and NOT release those changes back to the community or you want direct technical support.

[Anonymous Coward]

Are there any apps I'm likely to use or have heard of using this?

I could see it maybe being used for internal business apps where usability isn't much of a concern since you have a captive audience, but for apps sold to the public? Seems unlikely it would work all that well and wouldn't look or work like either an iOS or an Android app and be rejected, especially by iOS users who are used to be a pretty consistent UI from most apps.

[jlavery]

Re: Are there any apps I'm likely to use or have heard of using this?

I agree that x-platform tools which produce apps which don't look or behave like native apps will be rejected - that's why I use Xamarin.

Xamarin produces native look and feel, and native performance, apps. You can't tell the difference as a user between a Xamarin app and a native app.

For some apps built with Xamarin, visit https://xamarin.com/customers/ - of course, Xamarin would only be showing off the nice-looking and successful apps in the case study on this page, so even I take the content there with a pinch of salt!

Regarding pricing - I agree that it prices out smaller companies and 'hobbyists' (I hate that phrase). However, if you're producing commercial software, then the cost should be outweighed by the earnings /benefits from the toolset.

[Breen Whitman]

As the old saying goes, the only people that get rich during a gold rush are the people that sell the shovels(IE the tools).

[Michael Hoffmann]

IDE mark up

What doesn't make sense in their pricing approach is that the jump is essentially only for the ability to use Visual Studio instead of their vastly inferior Studio product. This despite VS itself now essentially being free in a near feature-complete (for just about any "amateur" developer) version.

It's a pity. I found it quite satisfying to learn mobile app development from my already familiar C#/.NET base and see my app appear on both an Apple and an Android device, each with their own look and feel with most of my code base shared in PCLs. I don't play the religious wars thing. But the artificial limit of what ...? 128KB before it tells you to get a business license or not use VS anymore is just ridiculous.

Would have expected that Microsoft as the True Big Boss now would rein them in, but apparently all sides there are quite happy with the state of affairs.