A lot of you guys ask me to do videos about Xamarin.forms and the future of mobile industry. How is Xamarin shaping the mobile industry and what are the implications for that?
In this video, I'll talk about Xamarin Forms, what Microsoft is thinking and how it can affect the whole mobile industry. For those who don't know
“Xamarin.Forms is a cross-platform UI toolkit that allows developers to easily create native user interface layouts that can be shared across Android, iOS, and Windows Phone. This section contains the introduction to Xamarin.Forms and our guides to help you build Xamarin.Forms apps. You can also learn more about its capabilities, try our samples, and browse the API documentation.” (Source: https://docs.microsoft.com/xamarin/xamarin-forms/)
So, how will Xamarin Forms shape the future of the mobile industry? Watch this video and find out!
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Transcript Of The Video
John Sonmez: So I got a question about Xamarin runs the future of the mobile industry. It's a little bit late answering this question. I could've been an oracle and predicted this, but I'll do my best now.
All right. So then you can just interview with a bunch of companies and then play them all against each other and get a super high offer. That's pretty cool. So check them out. Go to hire.com/simpleprogrammer. If you use that link, you'll get $2,000 instead of $1,000. If they try to just give you one, you just email me. Be like, “John, where's my money?” I'll pretend like I don't know what you're talking about. No, they wouldn't stiff you. Gosh, you guys, it's so judgmental. They're awesome people.
All right. Anyway, let's talk about Xamarin.forms. I got a lot of Xamarin.forms questions. I'm a Xamarin MVP, did you know that? I' ma Xamarin MVP. I'm not allowed to tell you inside knowledge about Xamarin, but I am a Xamarin MVP because I did Pluralsight courses on Xamarin. So if you think I'm bullshitting, I'm not bullshitting. Check this out, I did the first courses on Xamarin. Not only that, I did the slides for the first Xamarin Evolve Conference. That's right. I used to be a huge, huge Xamarin guy when I was … Because I actually like it. I like technology a lot. I love Miguel and Nate. They're awesome, and Joseph Hill. Yeah. In fact, I worked a Xamarin booth. All right. Joseph Hill called me up one day and he was like, “John, could you come down here and work this Xamarin booth? I'll give you a free monkey.” He did give me a free monkey and I had fun. I was telling people about Xamarin. I was way back in the day. Before they were big, before they got acquired by Microsoft, I used to work for them. Right? There's my opportunity where I probably miss left a couple of million bucks on the floor. I was like one of the first Xamarin trainers, probably the first. I was the first online course for Xamarin training, and yeah. I could've …
But I decided to live a different dream. This is my dream. You're watching it now. I wouldn't be the man I am today making these videos if I had gone the Xamarin road and been driving my Tesla to the Microsoft campus.
Lets talk about Xamarin.forms. All right. So I've been looking into Xamarin.forms and see them as a huge potential for the mobile industry. Do you think it would be an advantage to establish ourselves as a source of top quality Xamarin lessons?
I'm not sure who the ourselves is. I cut this out of the email. All right. So he says, “I feel like grasping a new emerging technology like Xamarin could be a route to see this blog succeed by establishing a demand for an audience that does not heavily exist, but has a potential to be massive in the future.”
So I'll just tell you kind of where my thoughts are. I mean, this is kind of an old email actually, and at that time I would've said, “Xamarin's going to get acquired by Microsoft.” And they did. That's awesome. But I can't say that I predicted it now unless I … I probably said it in some video at some point or Entre-Programmers or something. I predicted, by the way, Entre-Programmers was that Trump was going to win the election before he even said he was running for president. You can find that in one of the Entre-Programmers episodes, one of the old ones. That's my claim to fame. Okay? Yeah. I predicted that, and I predicted it the whole way along the whole election that he was going to win. I did, and it's on multiple videos. It's been on YouTube. It's been on Entre-Programmers. You can check that out. So I got a pretty good track record for picking one thing.
All right. As far as Xamarin.forms though, like I said, I love the technology. I think it's an awesome technology. It's an awesome group of people that are behind Xamarin, okay? I think that Xamarin.forms … Okay, so I did mobile development, right? Believe it or not. I actually have apps in the apps store. I did Android and iOS development. I did native development with Java on Android. Objectivicy on iOS. I did. Really. Objectivicy is a pain in the ass. All right. I haven't got used to it yet. Then I did the Xamarin stuff, and I saw how easy it was to do Xamarin development on those platforms, and I was blown away. I became a Xamarin. That's when I became the Xamarin.forms fanboy to be honest.
But there was still a problem. I had to develop my own framework to like abstract to weight the differences between the two platforms. They are different, and it is hard. So I build my own thing to do that, and then Xamarin.forms comes along and it does it better. To me, I see a huge value in that, right? Because basically if you're building an app today, you're building an iOS and Android version of the app. Okay? That means that you're either doing it natively or you're using some kind of cross platform tool. Even if you're using a cross platform tool, like Xamarin, without the forms part of it, you're still having to write specific code for iOS and for Android or create obstruction layers and do all this stuff unless you're using something like Titanium where the UA is generated. If you want a real native looking UI, you kind of have to do it specifically for the platform. But Xamarin forms makes it so that you don't. Most of that is encapsulated for you. That's only going to get better, right? Because now that Xamarin is part of Microsoft, it's being built right individual studio. There's a visual studio for Mac, which is basically Xamarin's studio.
If I can predict the future again, I'm going to say that this is going to become a major player. I think this is going to become one of the defactor standards. Plus, right, how much of Microsoft developers teach our developers are there, and how many of them have to write mobile apps for their Microsoft centric companies and what are they going to use. They're going to use the blessed by Microsoft Solution, which is Xamarin forms, right? That is going to … It makes sense to me. So I think that you're going to have a huge number of developers that are going to want to use this technology, going to want to know how to use this technology right, and they're going to have moolah because these are Microsoft shops that are going to be the primary customers here.
So I think it's a good idea. I would invest in this, right? I could be wrong, but I see this as the future. We'll see what happens with Microsoft. I think Microsoft it's going to make one more play at the phone market, and I think they've got a shot honestly. Because this is what Microsoft is good at. Some people say, “Ah, I don't know, John. You saw what they did with the Windows phone.” Yeah, that was just a trial. Okay? One of the things that Microsoft is really good at is taking stuff that is becoming late to the market, and fixing the problems and innovating in an already innovated market and then bringing that together and solving all the issues. So they sit and watch for a while and they see the failures and they see the mess ups. Then they come up with something new that's better than everything. Sometimes they do that and succeed, sometime they fail. Zune. But I don't know. We'll see what happens.
But if that does happen and Microsoft does build a phone platform, I guarantee you the biggest advantage is going to be the Xamarin forms developer that is going to automatically going to work for that phone, plus Android and iOS, right? Microsoft has some kind of strategy here with Xamarin forms. They didn't just buy Xamarin for no reason at all. There's something going on. So I think it's a good investment. I could be wrong, but who knows.
So I'm bullish on Xamarin and Xamarin.forms especially. That's my opinion and I'm sticking to it.
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