Avalonia: Comparison with Xamarin and projects with similar goals
I have no experience in cross platform .NET development, I have only tried Xamarin for a 2-3 screen demo app running on Android iOS and WP. Still it seems the .NET world is opening, some things are alpha, some are stable (yet work like some alpha), but it's becoming harder and harder to explore all options.
How is this different from Xamarin.Forms for example? Why would someone choose one and not the other?
I think it would be useful to see a document about the most shiny selling points of this framework.
SoonDead
All 8 comments
Xamarin.Forms uses the native controls on each platform to render instead of drawing customizable controls. Additionally, Xamarin.Forms only works on iOS, Android, WP, and UWP.
Conversely, Avalonia works on Windows, Linux, iOS, Android (may have regressed), UWP (missing glue code though), Mac OS X, and is very easily extensible to embedded platforms that support mono.
Xamarin.Forms is more stable currently. If you're doing mobile then Xamarin.Forms would be more useful right now, but Avalonia will give you more flexibility. However, once we stabilize Android, then Avalonia will be the only UI toolkit that works across both mobile and desktop platforms.
jkoritzinsky
on 10 Jul 2016
Xamarin Forms supports the following OSs
iOS, MacOS
Android
GTK (Linux)
WPF (soon x86/x64)
UWP ( W10, W10M, W10A, IoT Core, IoT Core Pro)
JimSEOW
on 11 Aug 2017
@JimSEOW I'm not aware of XF support for WPF, it does support UWP, though not sure WPF. Can you please include any reference for that fact?
weitzhandler
on 12 Aug 2017
@weitzhandler
It was announced in Build 2017, it is expected to come Q3 2017
https://blog.xamarin.com/glimpse-future-xamarin-forms-3-0/
JimSEOW
on 13 Aug 2017
@weitzhandler It is important that the different cross platform WPF efforts learn from each other and help each other!
JimSEOW
on 13 Aug 2017
we want ava and xf mixed together
juepiezhongren
on 14 Apr 2018
@juepiezhongren that would be pointless, since the two projects are divergent in their goals (Xamarin.Forms focuses with native experience in their target platforms, while Avalonia is for devs that want their apps to have uniform UI/UX across all supported platforms). Besides the untold amount of manpower required to merge the two projects or have them interoperate would be better focused on other aspects of the project that will be tangibly more beneficial to all.
jmacato
on 15 Apr 2018
@JimSEOW I'm not aware of XF support for WPF, it does support UWP, though not sure WPF. Can you please include any reference for that fact?
To work with Xamarin Forms with WPF you need to add a new project to your solution for WPF and add the corresponding Xamarin Forms Nuget
https://www.nuget.org/packages/Xamarin.Forms.Platform.WPF/
kevmoens
on 18 Mar 2019
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Most helpful comment
Xamarin.Forms uses the native controls on each platform to render instead of drawing customizable controls. Additionally, Xamarin.Forms only works on iOS, Android, WP, and UWP.
Conversely, Avalonia works on Windows, Linux, iOS, Android (may have regressed), UWP (missing glue code though), Mac OS X, and is very easily extensible to embedded platforms that support mono.
Xamarin.Forms is more stable currently. If you're doing mobile then Xamarin.Forms would be more useful right now, but Avalonia will give you more flexibility. However, once we stabilize Android, then Avalonia will be the only UI toolkit that works across both mobile and desktop platforms.