The Ultimate Guide to Xamarin.Forms for Native Ecommerce App Development

If you’re planning to launch an e-commerce app, native app development is likely the first idea that will cross your mind. It’s pretty natural.

Apps built via native route feel so intuitive and engaging after all. Nothing seems to beat them in terms of performance, speed, or security.

However, you can’t overlook the massive investment of time and money that goes into native development. Besides, native apps are also complex to maintain.

That’s why more businesses are now gravitating towards advanced, innovative, and cost-effective cross-platform apps.

Not only is a cross-platform app beautiful, but it also surpasses the boundaries of platforms and browsers and performs well everywhere. Moreover, the performance is also in line with the native user experience.

Plus, the cross-platform app development offers incredible conveniences such as push notifications, automated form-fills, extended payment options, personalization in content, and social media integration.

All these features make a cross-platform app framework ideal, especially for e-commerce app development.

What is Xamarin.Forms?

Xamarin.Forms is a cross-platform app framework used for building modern & performant native apps for UWP, iOS, and Android. It is built upon Xamarin.iOS and Xamarin.Android libraries.

Just like its predecessor Xamarin, Xamarin.Forms uses a single C# codebase and .NET technology to build a common sharable backend. It then transmits this backend code across platforms using the .NET Standard library or shared projects and natively compiles it for each OS.

So XF leads to a whopping 75% code reusability.

However, as an advanced feature of Xamarin, Xamarin.Forms goes the extra mile in code reusability. Besides the shared backend logic, Xamarin.Forms also allows the sharing of user interfaces. To do so, it introduces a cross-platform UI abstraction layer to communicate the UIs between platforms, meanwhile delivering a fully native UI experience.

To create shared UIs, Xamarin.Forms make use of a single unified API. And then, with the help of in-built classes called renderers, this app development platform transforms these UI objects into the platform-specific user interface at run time.

Xamarin.Forms offers you multiple ways to design the UI. You can do it using C#, XAML, or C# markup. The latter two allow a clean separation between the user interface and behaviour code and are recommended for advanced UIs.

The Model-View-ViewModel (MVVM) architecture helps guide this separation and makes your application easier to test, maintain, and evolve.

On the contrary, if you want customized UIs, then Xamarin.Forms has got you covered there too. You can discontinue with the XF framework at any point and write a couple of platform-specific renderers to build native UI elements.

So the app development landscape of Xamarin.Forms has the potential to lend a native look and feel to your applications if you need so.

And for native-like performance, you can make use of xamarin forms dependency service class to get access to platform-specific functionalities like location services, camera, accelerometer, and a lot more!

With Xamarin.Forms, a seamless native user experience is fully ensured. That’s what makes this app development platform a popular toolset for e-commerce app development.

Benefits of Xamarin.Forms

There’s nothing better than Xamarin.Forms when it comes to implementing a top-notch cross-platform app development solution. Here are good reasons for that -

• Rapid Development

Xamarin.Forms provides a steadfast app development environment due to the use of shareable codebase and single stack technology. This saves up a lot of development time and allows you to launch your application simultaneously on multiple platforms quickly.

• Native User Experience

Xamarin.Forms can convert UI components of your application into the corresponding native xamarin forms controls at runtime. As a result, you get applications that closely resemble each operating system’s native user interface.

• Simple Maintenance

Maintaining an app in a working condition can be tricky when multiple platforms are involved. Even if you make a slight functional change, you are responsible for propagating it through

every platform. But with Xamarin.Forms, the job becomes relatively easy due to the interchangeability of codebase between multiple platforms.

• Easy Testing

Before launching the application or releasing the updates, it’s crucial to test the app on multiple devices to ensure consistency and accuracy in performance across platforms. Xamarin.Forms application provides Xamarin.UItest for UI testing. It’s a cross-platform testing framework that writes and runs UI acceptance tests for multiple platforms simultaneously.

Disadvantages of Xamarin.Forms

Like any other framework, Xamarin.Forms is not a “one size fits all” solution. Here are a few challenges that may get in your way while working Xamarin.Forms -

• Large Applications

Applications developed via Xamarin.Forms tend to be heavier than the ones created with native technologies. That’s simply due to the use of numerous core libraries and shared functionalities by XF. However, the Microsoft Xamarin department is consistently working to reduce the overhead of applications and make them faster with time.

• Smaller Community

The Xamarin community is significantly smaller than communities of other native app development platforms like iOS and Android. Consequently, if the development team gets stuck somewhere, a little help may be available at their disposal. To resolve this problem, Microsoft offers self-paced Xamarin courses on its robust educational platform, Microsoft Learn, to ease developers’ lives.

Alternatives of Xamarin.Forms

If Xamarin.Forms doesn’t suit your e-commerce app development needs, you may consider the alternatives given below -

• React Native

React Native is a popular Javascript-based open-source app development framework created by Facebook. It is a cross-platform app framework capable of building iOS and Android apps that look and feel genuinely “native.” The app development framework offers various react native component libraries that you can bundle in your application to incorporate essential e-commerce app functionalities. In addition, it provides 60–90% of code reusability, which is reasonably high.

• Flutter

Flutter is an open-source, cross-platform app development framework by Google. It is quite a young technology and makes use of a relatively uncommon programming language called Dart. So the framework may present a bit of a challenging learning curve for developers in the beginning. However, it offers excellent performance and game-changing features like hot reloading, which makes it a perfect fit for e-commerce app development.

Summing up

Xamarin.Forms has today become the top-priority app development platform of most business owners as it decreases the time to market and reduces the engineering cost. This makes it an excellent fit for e-commerce app development. If you desire a rock-solid presence over app stores, your application needs to be of superior quality. It should be engaging and straightforward to use. If you do not have enough expertise and experience in app development, it becomes nearly impossible to develop such a robust app on your own. In such a case, it’s in your best interest to hire an app agency.