I need help.

Since few days I've been thinking to go for cross platform app development. I've heard some names like Xamarin, Flutter & React Native. But I'm confused in choosing one of them. Below are few things I've read about them.

Xamarin is more like native, but It needs more effort to make it cross platform.

Flutter is still in beta, but Its backed by google, So it can be future. + it has performance issues and it lacks many important libs.

React native uses Javascript. and It's kinda less native.

So, I'm confused to choose in of them. I need to choose the one with many libraries and is good at performance, and it must have less effort for making it for another platform.

It all depends on what you can do, if you know C# best, I recommend Xamarin.
Xamarin is not so difficult and has a large society, so if you encounter some difficulties at 100% you will find a solution on the web.
In addition, Xamarin can be native as well as forms. Which means you can write pages in native language and core in C #, or all in C #.

@Dragy001 Does that mean I can write in java its still cross platform?

@taosif7 No, you only write views in xml (as in Android) and the rest in C #. For Java, I'd rather look at the React Native, unfortunately I do not know this technology very well, only what I know is javascript and is from facebook (and apparently also has a large society).

Well that's true, with Xamarin you will have almost 100 percent native applications.

React Native is basically just "Native UI". In react, its basically JS code running calling natuve ui apis.

Xamarin compiles your code into the same byte code that would be geberated when you're developing native android apps. Plus you get both AOT and JIT compliation options here which you won't get in react.

On the other hand, I've seen some people struggling with UI development using XAML or XML if they are not familiar woth app dev. I personally find react easier to develop UI.

But react also gives poor performance on iOS applications since iOS requires JIT complilation, and as workaround, react uses JS Core Engine instead to run the application.

@DangerousDev So, should I go for Xamarin?

@Dragy001 agreed! A bigger community, means 9 times out of 10 somebody has done what you are trying to do.

Xamarin forms is good, compiler directives are a little ugly, but as long as you apply some structure (classes), you can make it a little more pretty and easier for colleagues to understand

@taosif7 you write in C#, but reference the Android libraries almost exactly the same as you would in Java. In fact, it all gets converted to Java anyway..

@taosif7 Being a Xamarin dev myself, I would highly recommend it! 🙂

@DangerousDev Is there something you regret not having in xamarin as compared to native android? please be honest.

@taosif7 Honestly, I do not have a lot of experience with Native. But Xamarin. Forms UI previewer is really bad! I hope it was better... I have to use things like Xamarin Live for developing better UI.

If you are developing an app which uses extremly platform specific features though Xamarin.Android or Xamarin.iOS are as good as their Native counterparts I think. We usually get support of new features within a day or two of their release. I won't recommend Xamarin.Forms in such scenario.