Daniel Hindrikes

Xamarin.Forms makes it possible to write UI for all the major mobile platforms, iOS, Android and Windows Phone with one shared code base. Many developers think that Xamarin.Forms isn't is good enough to create apps that will be published and they think Xamarin.Forms is more a tool for prototyping.

If you think Xamarin.Forms is a "magic" product that will fix everything, you will properly not succeed with Xamarin.Forms. For me Xamarin.Forms is a framework that helps me build apps for multiple platforms. If you look at Xamarin.Forms in that way you will increase your chances to success with Xamarin.Forms.

Xamarin.Forms is delivered with a lot of controls that uses the Xamarin.Forms framework to render native platform specific controls. A Xamarin.Forms control is in many way just a description of what the control can do. From that description is native controls rendered.

The power of Xamarin.Forms is that you can use the framework to create you own renderers if you want to renderer a control different then the standard renderer. You can also create your own controls by using custom renderers.

I guess one of the most common issues with Xamarin.Forms i ListView performance. It's not surprising, you maybe have 5 or 6 controls for each cell (row). If cells are reused you might have 8 cells. It means that forms need to create at least 40 renderer objects. And if any of the controls is a StackLayout or a RelativeLayout where it's render has do to a lot of calculations where to place controls I guess you will realize that it will use a lot of memory.

So if you instead create your own custom cell that has it own renderer, there will be only one renderer for each row or if you write a renderer for the whole list you will only have one renderer. Can you realize how much memory you will save on that? If not you will see it when you are scrolling in your ListView,

The biggest problem when using Xamarin.Forms is that the developers don't know how Xamarin.Forms works and they don't know much about the target platforms. If you want to create a excellent app with Xamarin.Forms you still need to have knowledge about the target platforms.

Now you maybe want to ask me why you should use Xamarin.Forms? The answer is that even if you have to write platform specific code for some views there are still much you can use of the controls that is delivered with Xamarin.Forms out of the box and the powerful Xamarin.Forms framework makes it possible to write platform specific code when what you get out of the box with Xamarin.Forms not is enough.

My recommendation is to so do as much as possible with what you get out of the box with forms and don't care about performance and if it doesn't look perfect from the beginning. When you have created your app and built all the business logic, then you can start to look at how to make the app perfect. Than you can start write platform specific code to get better performance and a better look of the app.