History

Founded in May 2011, Xamarin provides developers with a unified platform for building cross-platform mobile applications. The engineering team—authors of Mono, Mono for Android, and MonoTouch—joined forces to create a unique product that, using Microsoft technologies C# and .NET, enables development for Android, iOS, and Windows applications.

Fig. 2.50. Cross-platform mobile applications

In February 2016 Microsoft announced the acquisition of Xamarin. The Redmond technology giant added the technology to the Visual Studio integrated development environment. As of April 2017, more than 1.4 million developers from 120 countries used Xamarin.

Fig. 2.51 Platform-dependent and shared source code