If you’re a developer and read this news on March 18th of 2016, your heart may have grown three times larger than it was.
That was the day that it was announced Xamarin would be free for developers who used Visual Studio.4 This is a huge deal because previously Xamarin was actually quite costly — $25/month for individual users, $999/year for businesses, and $1899/year for enterprise.5
Xamarin makes life easier for mobile app developers. They do so by providing easy to learn & use tools that allow programmers to code with C#. Here’s the kicker though: you can do so across all platforms. With the Xamarin tools, you can code for an iPhone, and be able to use that code for an Android. No more having to write in each platform’s native language three times over with three times the amount of work. Even if you’re not a developer, that has to sound awesome.
For Visual Studio users (Windows) and Xamarin Studio users (Mac), the Xamarin tools are free to use in developing their mobile apps AND it’s also been announced that Xamarin will be open sources.1 For those of you non-tech-term-savvy-individuals, that means that basically anyone can freely redistribute, modify, edit, and add to the original source code, which allows improvements and revisions to be made by the users.
Slack, Pinterest, Kellogg’s, and Dow Jones (maybe you’ve heard of those) are just a few of the thousands of companies that use and rely on Xamarin tools. You can’t argue against clients like those.
It’s clear to us that Microsoft and Xamarin have both hit it big with this deal, and because the two are now partnered, they can both do so much more for the developer community. It will be interesting to see where this event progresses to.
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