QRZ Assistant now available in Google Play

Xamarin is a Microsoft ploy to become relevant in the smartphone arena. They failed miserably with Windows Phone and are now trying to embrace everything else in sight now that Windows is no longer the revenue source that it used to be.

I will admit that I liked the Visual Studio C# environment when I wrote some code for it a few years back. Basically, if you are willing to be language agnostic and use C#, it's okay from an IDE point of view - i.e. very robust. It's the go-to platform for writing anything that will run on Windows, plus a few other things like Android (new), IOS (new), and some Mac (new).

I've been trying to find an illustrative example that would sum up my displeasure with their approach. How about this one: Your spouse is from a foreign land. You don't speak their language and they don't speak yours. Their mother, however, speaks both languages fluently. Bingo! A solution, right? Well, not if you don't mind bring Mom along everywhere you go, for now until eternity because neither of you are ever going to learn the other's language. I suppose that's okay because it IS a solution, but, what kind of solution? You have to buy an extra plate at dinner, an extra seat on the train, an extra room for the house because Mom doesn't come without care and feeding requirements. If Mom ever goes into the hospital, you're both screwed and you sincerely pray that she pulls through OK.

The point here is that such a solution uses Microsoft to be your mother-in-law and she's no spring chicken. The Microsoft libraries and code that perform the translation are often times larger than the application itself. And then there is the issue of a black box standing between your code and the underlying operating system. In effect, it adds a proxy operating system between the two parts. In my opinion, both IOS and Android each have enough problems of their own and each of them are subject to distributing updates that break Xamarin in such a way that you fall behind in the usual upgrade cycle, waiting for Xamarin to catch up to them.

So, to summarize, I'm not in favor of adding a proxy operating system to "help" my app run on both platforms. You cannot, for example, code something for Android and let Xamarin run it on IOS. Nope, you have to code the application for Xamarin and let it run on both platforms, thereby losing the performance and unique benefits native coding can provide. In essence, it makes both versions suck at the same time.

Xamarin has been reviewed and determined to be a great fit for vertical, enterprise or corporate applications and not such a great fit for consumer facing apps. I'm sure there are exceptions to this (there always are), but in this case I remain skeptical.

73, -fred

 

There IS an iPhone app for QRZ, which has been available for quite some time. In the AppStore, look for Callsign Search and the QRZ Globe logo. This app is created and maintained by Neil Kutchera, K4FV an independent software developer.