DronaHQ as a mobility platform helps containerise all apps in one single app. It's a docker for mobile apps used to build, deploy and manage apps rapidly. DronaHQ includes:
Pre-built Container App across IOS/Android/Windows.
Cordova runtime & app management layer.
Platform & Device APIs to accelerate development.
Ability to deploy different apps for different user groups.
Ability to deploy bug fixes and new features in real…
If you enjoy being ripped off and ignored, I would highly recommend DronaHQ. If you are unable to configure the app yourself, they will connect you to a contractor. You will be charged by the hour, so its within their interest to drag the project out as long as possible. Once the project is delivered, you may find that the app is super slow e.g. 1-2 minutes for a page to load. When you complain, they will blacklist your email.
Xamarin is well suited for several reasons. The first, it allows companies to share code across platforms. If the app has a lot of business logic and a fairly simple UI, Xamarin is great for this use case. Xamarin also works well if the developers who will work on the app are already fluent in .NET. Xamarin is less appropriate if the company has a lot of developers. If there are plenty of resources to develop apps natively then the headache of dealing with Xamarin's issues are not worth the effort. If the UI is very complex and has difficult animations it's difficult to debug visual/performance issues in Xamarin.
Having also done a lot of native mobile development, some of the IDE's features need to emulator their native counterparts. For example, trying to extract a string resource on Android in Xamarin Studio is painful. There are many useful tools in Android Studio that Xamarin should implement.
Xamarin will always be behind on native platform features. They must catch up when Apple and Google release new platform versions.
The biggest pain point is the random issues Xamarin continues to have. Having a large code base on top of a native platform makes it very difficult to debug issues. Every developer must decide if its an issue with Xamarin or the native platform. Bugs don't get fixed very quickly. Hopefully that will change with the Microsoft acquisition.
Xamarin has been great for developing different projects efficiently and effectively. It's nice to reuse the core business logic across different platforms so that there are less to maintain and little replications are needed. The biggest benefit is that C# programmers do not have to learn a different language to do mobile development.
If you are required to develop applications that are cross-platformed, Xamarin is a great tool to use. It will help save time and efforts from your development team to be able to build applications seamlessly for android, IOS, windows, and web on a single platform instead of requiring multiple tools to get the job done
I never had to contact support for any help. Most of the problems we ran into, we were able to identify and use peer support through blogs and other internet sources to resolve the problems. There are plenty of sources online which provide tutorials, discuss problems, etc. Example: StackOverflow
Just with any programming tasks, have a plan first. Design out the system, spend time to build it correctly the first time and have plenty of testing and user acceptance opportunities. Xamarin was easy to implement for a C# programmer. However, you need to do tutorials to realize the platform's capabilities.
I was charged approx. $10k by DronaHQ to build an app over 6 months with page loading speed of 1-2minutes. Bubble.io took 2 weeks and $1000 to build a far superior app with page loading speed within 2 seconds.
Xamarin runs natively on MacOS, and the debugger and other integration and auto-complete tools are far better than Eclipse for C# .NET. It also carries much of the plugin/add-on capabilities that are so desirable on Atom. Eclipse is a better for generalized software development, provided a developer is comfortable switching between the IDE the command line for certain parts of their workflow, like building, package management, or debugging. But for C# .NET development on MacOS specifically, Xamarin is the best product I've used for the job.
Code Sharing - We were able to launch an Android implementation of our app within weeks after finishing iOS. The amount of time taken to develop a new platform is very small.
Monetization - not the best, but definitely getting better. We've had issues with finding suitable ad networks that work with Xamarin.
