Xamarin is a

Microsoft Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company, technology conglomerate headquartered in Redmond, Washington. Founded in 1975, the company became influential in the History of personal computers#The ear ...

-owned

San Francisco San Francisco, officially the City and County of San Francisco, is a commercial, Financial District, San Francisco, financial, and Culture of San Francisco, cultural center of Northern California. With a population of 827,526 residents as of ...

-based software company founded in May 2011 by the engineers that created Mono, Xamarin.Android (formerly Mono for Android) and Xamarin.iOS (formerly MonoTouch), which are

cross-platform Within computing, cross-platform software (also called multi-platform software, platform-agnostic software, or platform-independent software) is computer software that is designed to work in several Computing platform, computing platforms. Some ...

implementations of the

Common Language Infrastructure The Common Language Infrastructure (CLI) is an open specification and technical standard originally developed by Microsoft and standardized by International Organization for Standardization, ISO/International Electrotechnical Commission, IEC (ISO/ ...

(CLI) and Common Language Specifications (often called Microsoft .NET). With a C#-shared codebase, developers can use Xamarin tools to write

native Native may refer to: People * '' Jus sanguinis'', nationality by blood * '' Jus soli'', nationality by location of birth * Indigenous peoples, peoples with a set of specific rights based on their historical ties to a particular territory ** Nat ...

Android,

iOS Ios, Io or Nio (, ; ; locally Nios, Νιός) is a Greek island in the Cyclades group in the Aegean Sea. Ios is a hilly island with cliffs down to the sea on most sides. It is situated halfway between Naxos and Santorini. It is about long an ...

, and

Windows Windows is a Product lining, product line of Proprietary software, proprietary graphical user interface, graphical operating systems developed and marketed by Microsoft. It is grouped into families and subfamilies that cater to particular sec ...

apps with native

user interface In the industrial design field of human–computer interaction, a user interface (UI) is the space where interactions between humans and machines occur. The goal of this interaction is to allow effective operation and control of the machine fro ...

s and share code across multiple platforms, including

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, and

Linux Linux ( ) is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an kernel (operating system), operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically package manager, pac ...

. According to Xamarin, over 1.4 million developers were using Xamarin's products in 120 countries around the world as of April 2017. On February 24, 2016, Microsoft announced it had signed a definitive agreement to

acquire ''Acquire'' is a board game published by 3M in 1964 that involves multi-player mergers and acquisitions. It was one of the most popular games in the 3M Bookshelf games series published in the 1960s, and the only one still published in the Uni ...

Xamarin. Microsoft ended support for Xamarin on May 1, 2024 in favor of .NET MAUI. __TOC__

History

Origins in Ximian and Mono

In 1999 Miguel de Icaza and

Nat Friedman Nathaniel Dourif Friedman (born 6 August 1977) is an American technology executive and investor. He was the chief executive officer (CEO) of GitHub and former chairman of the GNOME Foundation. Friedman is currently a board member at the Arc Instit ...

launched what eventually became known as

Ximian Ximian, Inc. (previously called Helix Code and originally named International Gnome Support) was an American company that developed, sold and supported application software for Linux and Unix based on the GNOME platform. It was founded by Miguel ...

to support and develop software for de Icaza's nascent

GNOME A gnome () is a mythological creature and diminutive spirit in Renaissance magic and alchemy, introduced by Paracelsus in the 16th century and widely adopted by authors, including those of modern fantasy literature. They are typically depict ...

project. After Microsoft first announced their .NET Framework in June 2000, de Icaza began investigating whether a

version was feasible. The Mono open source project was launched on July 19, 2001. Ximian was bought by

Novell Novell, Inc. () was an American software and services company headquartered in Provo, Utah, that existed from 1980 until 2014. Its most significant product was the multi-platform network operating system known as NetWare. Novell technolog ...

on August 4, 2003, which was then acquired by Attachmate in April 2011. After the acquisition, Attachmate announced hundreds of layoffs for the Novell workforce, including Mono developers, putting the future of Mono in question.

Founding Xamarin

On May 16, 2011, Miguel de Icaza announced on his blog that Mono would be developed and supported by Xamarin, a newly formed company that planned to release a new suite of mobile products. According to de Icaza, at least part of the original Mono team had moved to the new company. The name Xamarin comes from the name of the Tamarin monkey, replacing the leading T with an X. This is in line with the naming theme used ever since Ximian was started. After Xamarin was announced, the future of the project was questioned since MonoTouch and Mono for Android would now be in direct competition with the existing commercial offerings owned by Attachmate. It was not known at that time how Xamarin would prove they had not illegally used technologies previously developed when they were employed by Novell for the same work. In July 2011, however, Novell – now a subsidiary of Attachmate – and Xamarin announced that Novell had granted a perpetual license to Xamarin for Mono, MonoTouch and Mono for Android, and Xamarin formally and legally took official stewardship of the project.

Product development

In May 2012, Xamarin released XobotOS, an experimental Android implementation using C# instead of

Java Java is one of the Greater Sunda Islands in Indonesia. It is bordered by the Indian Ocean to the south and the Java Sea (a part of Pacific Ocean) to the north. With a population of 156.9 million people (including Madura) in mid 2024, proje ...

. In December 2012, Xamarin released Xamarin.Mac, a plugin for the existing MonoDevelop

Integrated development environment An integrated development environment (IDE) is a Application software, software application that provides comprehensive facilities for software development. An IDE normally consists of at least a source-code editor, build automation tools, an ...

(IDE), which allows developers to build C#-based applications for the Apple's

operating system and package them for publishing via the

App Store An app store, also called an app marketplace or app catalog, is a type of digital distribution platform for computer software called applications, often in a mobile context. Apps provide a specific set of functions which, by definition, do not i ...

. In February 2013, Xamarin announced the release of Xamarin 2.0. The release included two main components: Xamarin Studio, a re-branding of its open-source IDE Monodevelop; and integration with

Visual Studio Visual Studio is an integrated development environment (IDE) developed by Microsoft. It is used to develop computer programs including web site, websites, web apps, web services and mobile apps. Visual Studio uses Microsoft software development ...

, Microsoft's IDE for the .NET Framework, allowing Visual Studio to be used for creating applications for Android, iOS and Windows.

Funding

On July 17, 2013, Xamarin announced that they had closed $16 million (~$ in ) in

Series B A venture round is a type of funding round used for venture capital financing, by which startup companies obtain investment, generally from venture capitalists and other institutional investors. The availability of venture funding is among the ...

funding led by Lead Edge Capital. Several investors from their

Series A A series A is the name typically given to a company's first significant round of venture capital financing. It can be followed by the word round, investment or financing. The name refers to the class of preferred stock sold to investors in exchan ...

funding also participated, including Charles River Ventures,

Floodgate Floodgates, also called stop gates, are adjustable gates used to control water flow in flood barriers, reservoir, river, stream, or levee systems. They may be designed to set spillway crest heights in dams, to adjust flow rates in sluices and ...

, and Ignition Partners. On August 21, 2014, Xamarin successfully closed an additional $54 million (~$ in ) in Series C funding, which is one of the largest rounds of funding ever raised by a mobile app development platform. As of August 2014 the total funding for the company was $82 million (~$ in ).

Acquisition

On February 24, 2016, Xamarin and

announced that Microsoft signed a definitive agreement to acquire Xamarin. Terms of the deal were not disclosed, though the Wall Street Journal reported the price at between $400 million and $500 million.

Microsoft subsidiary (2016–present)

Microsoft Build Microsoft Build (often stylised as ) is an annual Business conference, conference event held by Microsoft, aimed at Software engineering, software engineers and web developers using Windows, Microsoft Azure and other Microsoft technologies. Fi ...

2016 Microsoft announced that they will open-source the Xamarin SDK and that they will bundle it as a free tool within

Microsoft Visual Studio Visual Studio is an integrated development environment (IDE) developed by Microsoft. It is used to develop computer programs including websites, web apps, web services and mobile apps. Visual Studio uses Microsoft software development platforms ...

's integrated development environment, and Visual Studio Enterprise users would also get Xamarin's enterprise features free of charge. As a part of the acquisition they would also relicense Mono completely under the

MIT License The MIT License is a permissive software license originating at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the late 1980s. As a permissive license, it puts very few restrictions on reuse and therefore has high license compatibility. Unl ...

and would release all other Xamarin SDK software through the .NET Foundation also under the MIT License.

Products

Xamarin platform

The Xamarin company produces an

open source Open source is source code that is made freely available for possible modification and redistribution. Products include permission to use and view the source code, design documents, or content of the product. The open source model is a decentrali ...

software platform by the same name, and Xamarin 2.0 was released in February 2013. Xamarin extends the .NET developer platform with tools and libraries specifically for building apps for Android,

tvOS tvOS (formerly Apple TV Software) is an operating system developed by Apple for the Apple TV, a digital media player. In the first-generation Apple TV, Apple TV Software was based on Mac OS X. The software for the second-generation and later ...

watchOS watchOS is the operating system of the Apple Watch, developed by Apple Inc., Apple. It is based on iOS, the operating system used by the iPhone, and has many similar features. It was released on April 24, 2015, along with the Apple Watch, the o ...

, and Windows ( UWP) primarily with C# in Visual Studio. Developers can re-use their existing C# code, and share significant code across device platforms. Several well-known companies including 3M,

AT&T AT&T Inc., an abbreviation for its predecessor's former name, the American Telephone and Telegraph Company, is an American multinational telecommunications holding company headquartered at Whitacre Tower in Downtown Dallas, Texas. It is the w ...

, and HP have used the platform to create their apps. Xamarin integrates with Visual Studio, Microsoft's IDE for the .NET Framework, and subsequently is available for use by macOS users through Visual Studio for Mac. Xamarin also released a component store to integrate backend systems, 3rd party libraries, cloud services and UI controls directly into mobile apps.

Xamarin.Forms

Introduced in Xamarin 3 on May 28, 2014, and allows one to use portable controls subsets that are mapped to native controls of Android, iOS and Windows Phone. Windows Phone was deprecated and removed in favour of UWP. It is also possible to target other different platforms such as Tizen (by Samsung), GTK (Linux), WPF and macOS even though they have stayed in Preview. This system uses XAML. Microsoft has modified this framework to work with the

Universal Windows Platform Universal Windows Platform (UWP) is a computing platform created by Microsoft and introduced in Windows 10. The purpose of this platform is to help develop universal apps that run on Windows 10, Windows 10 Mobile (discontinued), Windows 11, Xbox ...

. Microsoft enables native mobile development with Blazor. Mobile Blazor Bindings allow developers to build native Android and iOS using C#, .NET, and web programming patterns.

.NET MAUI

At Microsoft Build 2020, Microsoft announced that Xamarin.Forms was going to be merged into .NET 6 as .NET Multi-platform App UI (.NET MAUI). .NET MAUI adds macOS support via Mac Catalyst. On May 23, 2022, during Microsoft Build 2022, .NET MAUI was released. Microsoft stated that they will continue supporting Xamarin until it is fully replaced by .NET MAUI in May 2024.

Xamarin Test Cloud

Xamarin Test Cloud makes it possible to test mobile apps written in any language on real, non-jailbroken devices in the cloud. Xamarin Test Cloud uses object-based UI testing to simulate real user interactions.

Xamarin for Visual Studio

Xamarin is a .NET developer platform made up of tools, programming languages, and libraries for building many different types of applications. Xamarin supplies add-ins to Microsoft Visual Studio that allows developers to build Android, iOS, and Windows apps within the IDE using

code completion Code completion is an autocompletion feature in many integrated development environments (IDEs) that speeds up the process of coding applications by fixing common mistakes and suggesting lines of code. This usually happens through popups while typ ...

and IntelliSense. Xamarin for Visual Studio also has extensions that provide support for the building, deploying, and debugging of apps on a simulator or a device. In late 2013, Xamarin and Microsoft announced a partnership that included further technical integration and customer programs to make it possible for their joint developer bases to build for all mobile platforms. In addition, Xamarin now includes support for Microsoft Portable Class Libraries and most C# 5.0 features such as async/await. CEO and co-founder of Xamarin, Nat Friedman, announced the alliance at the launch of Visual Studio 2013 in New York. Xamarin is useful in developing iOS and Android apps. On March 31, 2016, Microsoft announced that they were merging all of Xamarin's software with every version of Microsoft Visual Studio including Visual Studio Community, and this added various Xamarin features to come pre-installed in Visual Studio such as an iOS emulator.

Xamarin Studio

At the time of its release in February 2013, Xamarin Studio was a standalone IDE for mobile app development on Windows and macOS, as part of Xamarin 2.0 based on the open source project MonoDevelop. In addition to a debugger, Xamarin Studio includes code completion in C#, an Android UI builder for creating user interfaces without XML, and integration with Xcode Interface Builder for iOS app design. On Windows Xamarin Studio is now deprecated and was replaced with Xamarin for Visual Studio. On

Xamarin Studio is still in development, but was rebranded in 2016 as Visual Studio for Mac.

Xamarin.Mac

Xamarin.Mac was created as a tool for Apple technology application development using the C# programming language. Xamarin.Mac, as with Xamarin.iOS and Xamarin.Android, gives developers up to 90% of code reuse across Android, iOS and Windows. Xamarin.Mac gives C# developers the ability to build fully native Cocoa apps for macOS and allows for native apps that can be put into the Mac App Store.

.NET Mobility Scanner

Xamarin's .NET Mobility Scanner lets developers see how much of their .NET code can run on other operating systems, specifically Android, iOS, Windows Phone, and Windows Store. It is a free web-based service that uses Silverlight.How mobile is your .NET?
, Retrieved June 24, 2014

RoboVM

In October 2015 Xamarin announced that they had acquired the Swedish RoboVM for Java developer platform akin to its offerings, the reason stated by Xamarin for the acquisition was that if they developed a

-based platform from the ground up, their end product would be similar to RoboVM so they acquired the company instead; as a result RoboVM operates independently of the Xamarin team. RoboVM enables developers to build Java apps for iOS and Android with fully native UIs, native performances, and all Java apps have the complete access to the APIs of each developer platform. In April 2016 Microsoft announced that they would discontinue RoboVM and cease all subscriptions after April 30, 2017. BugVM, a fork of RoboVM was created to maintain the free open source status.

Acquisitions

* In 2013, Xamarin acquired the mobile application testing platform LessPainful. * In 2015, Xamarin acquired the Java application development platform RoboVM.

References

External links

* {{Microsoft FOSS Software companies established in 2011 Microsoft acquisitions Development tools Microsoft subsidiaries Microsoft websites Mobile software programming tools American companies established in 2011 2011 establishments in California 2016 mergers and acquisitions