iOS Microsoft buys Xamarin, is this a game changer?

[1458279]

http://www.infoworld.com/article/30...ens-door-to-truly-universal-windows-apps.html

Microsoft has tried just about everything to find a footing, but this could be a game changer.

Imagine one code set for all devices.

Is this good or bad? Anyone using Xamarin? How good is it? Is this any different than Html5?

It's not the 1st tool for multi-platform, and HTML5 has been around for a while. I doubt they are native and they've never been able to catch the main stream.

This is different from Unity, because it's not just games.

 

[AxoNeuron]

Honestly I'm surprised it took them this long. It's an obvious move and they should have done it a long time ago.

They want Xamarin so that people making apps for iOS and Android will also put them on the Windows app store. Kind of sad that they're spending so much money just so that iOS & Android developers will publish on the Windows store almost as an afterthought.

 

[1458279]

Honestly I'm surprised it took them this long. It's an obvious move and they should have done it a long time ago.

They want Xamarin so that people making apps for iOS and Android will also put them on the Windows app store. Kind of sad that they're spending so much money just so that iOS & Android developers will publish on the Windows store almost as an afterthought.

But how will it take?

People can use HTML5 right now, it's been an option for a while.

Also, Xamarin is not new, so what can MS do to gain more devs?

MS did make something for ObjC to run on their phones, but I haven't heard much about that lately.

I think part of the issue is that unless Xamarin uses some mainstream languages and has compatible APIs, it's just not going to make a difference.

MS just doesn't have enough phones and will have to make native iOS apps work without major code changes.
[doublepost=1456366929][/doublepost]So it looks like it uses C# and works in the Windows Dev system. So this is more of a "make windows phone apps work on iOS" thing.

One problem there is that most don't use the windows dev system.

IIRC, I thought that ObjC thing they did was about the same, where they made ObjC work with their system.

Maybe if Xcode were open, they could take the output and make it work for other devices.

One of my concerns would be native vs VM runtime. I love native and I think Android and Windows went VM.