Is Xamarin Forms ready for Production usage

Question

I've been learning Xamarin for the past few months and while I've been mainly using PCL projects I'm excited to start using Xamarin forms.

My one hesitation is if it is ready for production sized uses. Does it have the specificity needed or is it a case of writing some custom custom renderer/control to get by?

From what I have researched so far it seems that developers are happy with it but they all talk about having to add customs features, which would be above my skill level at this time.

Any insight in the progression of xamarin forms would be really helpful.

Answer 1

It is ready for production usage as there are a number of apps available that use it. For example the recent Xamarin Evolve conference had a companion app written in Forms, and the source is freely available if you wanted to grab it and have a look.

Forms gives you a lot out of the box, but not everything. It is a bit of a 'lowest common denominator' tool providing features that are common to both platforms but as you say you can always write custom renderers to access platform specific stuff.

One cool thing to be aware of is that in the preview versions there is code for doing things like putting native controls into your XAML and these only show on the correct platform. This is an area that is constantly growing, there's code coming that allow you to tweak properties on the underlying platform controls inside your shared XAML, just by tagging the property as relevant only to one platform.

Xamarin are targeting Forms more and more for beginners to the platform. They've shown this by changing their XamU to be more forms focussed, and their internal blog covers Forms more than anything else. It's good enough for most things now, but is getting better fast. Honestly if I was building a brand new app now I would seriously consider Forms unless the app needed heavy platform specific UI customisations.