How does Xamarin iOS and Android work?

Question

I try to understand how Xamarin.iOS (MonoTouch) and Xamarin.Android (Mono for Android) work. I wrote a little App and looked into the .app and .apk file.

Inside of the .app file (iOS) are many .dll files. But why? On every page and post I read they say: The App is executed native and nothing is interpreted. Can somebody explain to me what the xamarin developer mean with "native"?

Inside of the .apk file is not a single .dll file..

Answer 1

The Xamarin definition of "native" includes but is not limited to:

• Every line of C# code is compiled to machine code and then packed in .app. There is no JIT at runtime, as it is suppressed by AOT. More information can be found at

http://www.mono-project.com/AOT

(Note that Xamarin.Android still uses JIT, http://xamarin.com/how-it-works)

• Access to platform native types / API is fully open, so you are not limited to a small set of API calls (if you use HTML5 / JavaScript, you know what kind of limitations are there).

• The user interface you design is bound to the native API exposed by iOS (CocoaTouch) or Android (Skia). There is no intermediate layer to hurt performance or look and feel.

As to what is inside .ipa or .apk, who cares? Of course @Jason's comment shows us of some internal implementation details.