We are living in the age of mobility. Currently, there are more mobile connections than the number of people living on planet Earth. Smartphones are becoming more popular. The GSMA Intelligence report forecasts that by 2020, smartphones will account for two thirds of all mobile connections. Unsurprisingly, there are more smartphones to be seen in all kinds of enterprises. Employees love to use their smart mobile devices, phones and tablets at work as well as outside work. This trend has been noticed by organizations and hence, they are opening up to Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) paradigm. This allows employees to be more productive on the go. Enterprises are looking to securely make in-premise data and legacy applications available on employees' mobile devices. More and more enterprises are paying heed to this trend and are interested in creating proprietary mobile applications for use by their employees.
Because of the inherent multi-platform nature of BYOD and prohibitive cost of writing multiple ports of mobile applications, enterprises need to look for cross platform tools for the development of mobile applications. For any mobile application development platform to be viable for use in any enterprise, it should have the following features:
- Cross platform development
- Great looking and highly responsive user interface
- Security at the code level and for data at rest
- Ever improving ecosystem of enterprise back-end and cloud connectors
Considering the above factors, Xamarin is a very viable mobile application development platform for enterprises. Xamarin is a cross-platform application development platform. Developers can write applications for iOS, Android and Windows Phone platform using the C# programming language. This approach provides 60-70% of code reuse across the three mobile platforms viz. iOS, Android and Windows Phone. There is an ever improving cross-platform user interface library now available for the Xamarin platform called 'Xamarin.Forms' – a bleeding edge technology from Xamarin. With Xamarin.Forms, 100% code reuse across platforms becomes a possibility. Enterprises can make use of vast amount of the available .Net C# development talent (possibly in-house team working on ASP.Net backend technologies) for the development of mobile application using Xamarin.
Xamarin applications are native applications and because of that, they do not suffer from performance problems visible in HTML5 and JavaScript based cross platform applications. Xamarin C# code compiles into native binaries, making code de-compilation much tougher compared to HTML5 and JavaScript based cross platform options. Enterprises need to make sure that the mobile applications do not leak confidential data. Xamarin includes support for fully functional .Net security stack that can be used by developers in their applications. Third party component like SQLCipher provides support for encryption of data at rest.
A great enterprise and cloud services ecosystem is getting built around Xamarin. More and more enterprises and cloud software providers are showing interest in it. Major software providers like SAP, Salesforce, IBM and Microsoft have built components for Xamarin.
SAP has collaborated with Xamarin to enable enterprise mobility for enterprises running SAP software. Salesforce SDK is available for free on the Xamarin components store. IBM has made available its MobileFirst SDK through the Xamarin component store. Microsoft Azure mobile service connectors are available for Xamarin, making it easier for enterprise mobile applications to store non-sensitive application data in the Azure cloud.
Xamarin is enjoying support from Mobile Backend as a Service (MBaaS) providers as well. MBaaS is the new buzzword in the field of enterprise mobility. MBaaS systems provide mobile optimized cloud backend system and enterprise backend connectors, making development work easier for enterprise mobile application developers. KidoZen is a notable player in the MBaaS market. KidoZen provides private and public cloud based backend for mobile applications. It also provides numerous enterprise backend connectors. KidoZen has made its SDK available on the Xamarin component store, allowing Xamarin-based mobile applications to connect with various backend systems, using very small amount of code.
In my opinion, above mentioned points make Xamarin a good candidate for implementation of a mobile enterprise.
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