Mobile Development Stack: Native vs Xamarin vs Xamarin Forms

Platform Support

If you’re building a new smartphone or tablet app, the question you’ve likely pondered upon was which platforms (and form factors) are you going to support.

Whether you are building one platform for both phone and tablet, or two platforms just for phone, or even whether the phone and tablet versions should be different, this choice should be made carefully in case your mind changes later. According to YAGNI, you don’t want to over-engineer, but in choosing a development stack you also don’t want to settle on a path that will prevent you from being able to share code in future work.

After you conclude on this, the next is to decide on which stack you’re going to be developing it under. This choice can lock you into commitments you may not have even thought of yet, so choose with forethought. There isn’t a universally wrong answer, but each has its tradeoffs that you have to be okay with.

The Purely Native Stack

This is the happy path for each platform, so things should just work. You will have the most support here, and any question you can think of has already been answered. You can take full advantage of the platforms’ features and have confidence that your toolkit is as the OS developers intended.