xamarin-macios VS Avalonia

Xamarin.ios y Xamarin.Mac: Licencia MIT.

Try to build the project for Android and iOS respectively. If you suffered from the iOS build issue Error MT4109: Failed to compile the generated registrar code caused by Xcode 14, you can visit https://github.com/xamarin/xamarin-macios/issues/15954 to find the solution. The issue can be fixed by installing xamarin.ios-16.0.0.72.pkg. To run the app on iOS 16, turn on Settings > Privacy & Security > Developer Mode.

See this for more info.

There is nothing planned. Downgrade immediately https://github.com/xamarin/xamarin-macios/issues/15954

MAUI on iOS and MacCatalyst use: https://github.com/xamarin/xamarin-macios

You can see in old issues like this how uncertain even the core team was about it. It's not really tenable to fly that blind.

I think they're still doing tooling updates for Xamarin for a while. For one, there are platforms that for now aren't (yet) moving to .NET 6 at all, such as watchOS. And second, they seem to have changed their Apple platforms tooling to basically dual-target Mono (for Xamarin) and .NET 6 (for MAUI).

Microsoft decided not to support the Apple Watch in .NET 6 (https://github.com/xamarin/xamarin-macios/issues/8955), which made me uncertain as to its future on the Apple Watch - I was also interested in learning Swift and SwiftUI.

You might also want to look at AvaloniaUI[0] for a cross platform .NET GUI library. It is similar to WPF but much nicer to work with.

[0] https://github.com/AvaloniaUI/Avalonia

Production user here. There's no money gotchas. They're above reproach. In fact, I've received considerable free support from their devs on GitHub Issues [1].

The Avalonia business model is based on selling XPF, which runs WPF (Windows-only) apps on other platforms. That's very interesting to big corps with existing codebases.

See my comment [2]

[1] https://github.com/AvaloniaUI/Avalonia/issues

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39246988#39249128

Yes, but the portable GUI frameworks by Microsoft themselves are generally not very good, and they tend to be abandoned after a couple of years.

Avalonia is developed outside of the Microsoft corporate madness and seems to be slowly becoming the defacto cross-platform framework because it is expected to last a bit longer than a manager's attention span: https://avaloniaui.net/

Not my comment, but relevant here "The problem with compiling Skia to WASM is you'll lose any benefits of hardware graphics acceleration on the device."

(From https://github.com/AvaloniaUI/Avalonia/discussions/6831#disc... )

It's a bit of a hit and miss as of today. CLI, back-end and natively compiled libraries (think dll/so/dylib or even .lib/.a - you can statically link NAOT binaries into other "unmanaged" code) work best, GUI - requires more work.

Avalonia[0] and MAUI[1] have known working templates with it, but YMMV.

[0] https://github.com/lixinyang123/AvaloniaAOT / https://github.com/AvaloniaUI/Avalonia/ / honorable mention https://github.com/VincentH-Net/CSharpForMarkup

[1] https://github.com/dotnet/maui (try out with just true in csproj - it is known to work e.g. on iOS)

For desktop, Avalonia, hands down.

https://avaloniaui.net/

Open source, powered by Skia, backed by JetBrains, and quite battle-tested at this point for small to medium-sized apps. In theory perfectly capable for enterprise as well, since it's basically a spiritual successor to WPF, which has been an industry standard for about 15 years.

They're diving into mobile and WASM well, but that's more of a recent effort and I haven't tested that yet.