Welcome to the course on developing cross-platform mobile application in Xamarin and C# .NET for beginners. This course assumes a basic knowledge of C# .NET. You’re going to learn how to create native Android, iOS, and Windows apps. We’ll start with a classic Hello world application, then we’ll get to using the database, camera, contacts, notifications and retrieving data from a website using an API.
Introduction to Mobile Applications
Mobile apps, like web apps, are on the rise today. Let’s think about why these applications are so popular for both users and businesses. It’s really simple.
If the user installs our application, we can inform them about news, benefits, etc. easily and directly on their phone and thus increase the chance to sell something. This would probably be difficult to achieve with an email newsletter, which the user usually deletes straightaway without reading it at all. As a bonus, we’ll get information about the user’s device, such as their location, so we can target our offers to a specific city / location and adjust the product offer accordingly. That was for businesses. And for the mobile users, the benefits of mobile apps are that they can browse most of the content offline, for example, when traveling by subway.
Sounds good, doesn’t it? Let’s also move to the pitfalls of mobile application development. There are currently 3 platforms (Android, iOS, and Windows) and each uses a different programming language.
- Android (Java, Kotlin)
- iOS (Swift)
- Windows (C#)
So if our customer wants to create an application for all these platforms, it’d be a hell of work. If you ever wondered it’s unnecessary to write the same application 3 times – one for Android, the other for iOS, the third for Windows, and each in a different language, then you’re in the right place.