Develop Android App Using C#

Develop Android app using C#

You could use Mono for Android:

http://xamarin.com/monoforandroid

An alternative is dot42:

http://www.dot42.com/

dot42 provides a free community licence as well as a professional licence for $399.

For Android App c# is better or java?

You can use Xamarin if you want to develop mobile apps with c#. However, when I ask mobile developers, they prefer to write native apps.

With Xamarin you will have the option of using VS which I think is very good, but you have to consider that it is usable for develop both Android and IOS apps. You have to consider performance and size of the app.

I have to add that Xamarin is now free if you have Visual Studio 2015

So my advice in total would be:

If you need only Android or IOS: go with native

If you need both Android and IOS and it is a small company or if the budget is limited, then go with Xamarin

If not again go with native

---

There is also a project called Apache Cordova which will do the same using javascript

Can I create an Android app using Xamarin only

Yes, Xamarin can be used to develop Android apps from scratch. Xamarin has two main libraries that help with this.

Xamarin.Android will give you access to all the Android APIs directly from c#. Note that you still need to know the basic Android concepts like what is an Activity and an Intent.
The other library is Xamarin.Forms. It is a cross-platform library that will give you a basic set of UI controls and widgets that you declare usong an xml syntax, and program with C#. This library has a few limitations, but you can also use the features of Xamarin.Android alongside it to get at the missing features.

Some advice: if possible, develop and debug directly on an Android tablet. Android emulators are not that good and hard to configure. Hope this helps.

---

Related Topics