We’re pleased to announce we have scheduled two apps to be developed on the Xamarin platform, and plan to offer Xamarin development to our clients moving forward.

Xamarin allows us to more efficiently develop cross platform apps for iOS, Android and even Windows Phone by developing in a common language: C#.  This allows us to reuse core code common to all platforms, and limits the platform specific code required to just what’s necessary to handle platform specific UI and device specific functionality.

Right now we are looking into any limitations that might restrict our use of Xamarin on certain projects, but from what we can see so far, this is a terrific way forward to serve our clients requiring cross-platform app development on a leaner budget and timeline.

Our game clients already know the power of cross platform development atop .NET and C# — we’ve been developing this way in Unity for years.  Our game clients also know that developing this way allows us to build up a game for iOS, the web, or Android, and quickly port to other platforms — usually in a matter of days per each new platform.  While Xamarin isn’t quite as easy on the porting side as Unity — platform specific UI and look-and-feel have to be taken into account which results in a little more development time than Unity — the benefits are largely the same.

We’ve avoided every other cross platform toolkit we’ve come across in the past (save for Unity, of course), because they all more or less take a “lowest common denominator” approach to cross platform development.  That is definitely not the case with Xamarin, which insists that platform specific code be developed separately, and more importantly, in a platform-specific way, which results in apps that are essentially indistinguishable from native apps.  In fact, as far as we can tell, they are native apps.

We’ll have more information on Xamarin as this develops, and as we wrap up these first few developments.  Stay tuned!