Xamarin

» see xamarin.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

I never wrote in this stack. My working code has been C++ and Python pointed at cameras for most of a career, and the C# mobile world sat off to one side of that, close enough to read the release notes and never close enough for my opinion of it to be worth anything. What I did follow was the company, because the people running it had been trying to get C# to run somewhere other than Windows since 1999 and kept losing their employer.

The lineage goes Ximian in 1999, bought by Novell in 2003. Then Attachmate bought Novell in 2011 and laid off the Mono developers almost immediately. De Icaza and Friedman founded Xamarin on 16 May 2011 to keep going, and in July that year Novell handed over a perpetual license to Mono, MonoTouch and Mono for Android, which turned an awkward situation into a company with actual assets. That was the third corporate home for the same runtime in twelve years.

The product got good. Xamarin.iOS and Xamarin.Android gave you the real platform APIs from C# instead of a web view pretending to be an app, and on 28 May 2014 Xamarin.Forms added a shared UI layer on top so that one description of a screen could render as native controls on either side. By April 2017 Microsoft was claiming over 1.4 million developers using it in 120 countries.

~ the dossier ~

~ the price of the ticket ~

Before Microsoft, Xamarin was expensive in a way that defined who used it. Indie developers could get in around $25 a month. The Business tier, which is what unlocked the Visual Studio integration everyone actually wanted, ran $999 a year per developer, and Enterprise was $1,899. Those were per platform, so a small shop targeting both iPhone and Android was looking at a real line item before writing a line of code.

The effect was that Xamarin lived almost entirely inside companies that already had a .NET team and a budget line for tooling. Hobbyists went to PhoneGap and later to React Native, both of which cost nothing from the first day.

~ bought and given away ~

Microsoft announced the acquisition on 24 February 2016 after years of rumors that it would. Terms were not disclosed; the Wall Street Journal put it between $400 million and $500 million. Six weeks later, at Build on 31 March, de Icaza stood on a Microsoft stage and the pricing evaporated. Xamarin became a free component of every edition of Visual Studio including the free Community one, and the SDK went open source under the MIT license into the .NET Foundation, runtime and libraries and command line tools together.

Xamarin stopped being a company with customers that week and became a component shipped inside somebody else's IDE. De Icaza stayed at Microsoft until 2022. Friedman left to run GitHub after Microsoft bought that too.

~ 1 may 2024 ~

Once it was inside Microsoft the parts came apart and were renamed separately. Xamarin Studio became Visual Studio for Mac, which was itself retired on 31 August 2024. Xamarin Test Cloud became part of App Center, which was retired on 31 March 2025. Xamarin.Forms was rebuilt as .NET MAUI, announced in 2020, and the iOS and Android bindings were absorbed into .NET proper.

The official support policy set a single hard date for what was left. On 1 May 2024 every Xamarin SDK went unsupported, Xamarin.Forms included. Android API 34 and the Xcode 15 SDKs are the last targets any Xamarin build will ever know about, so an app still on it keeps running and quietly stops being able to follow the phone it runs on. Moving to MAUI was never a compiler flag or a rename in a project file. It was a port, which is why the number of Xamarin apps still out there is larger than Microsoft would like.

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