Hopefully, Xamarin will add Visual Studio support in the Indie dev plan at some point. Currently, if you want to support iOS, Android and use Visual Studio you need to pay $1798 per year which is a bit more for a one man shop.
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For a larger corporate, ~$1,800 is very reasonable.
Xamarin have a tough line to walk - larger companies will happily pay that price, while still being reasonable for indie developers.
Xamarin support is excellent - their forums, twitter etc. I haven't worked with a vendor before that has been that helpful. Xamarin need to cover their costs.
I've been using Xamarin Studio for a while now for both iOS & Android and its fine.
They just need to make two different price plans: you are a corporation? Here the corporation pack. You are a alone dev? Here a very lowered-price alone dev pack.
It is not that hard, just put a clause in the license that oblige the corporations to buy their related pack
Or maybe just charge more for the 2nd and later license seats. That may make it even easier to get business to go all-in.
There really should be a one-man shop deep price break. I've used the iOS Pro edition for years since I got grandfathered in for my small iOS app but I don't come anywhere near to breaking even with that so I can't consider adding on Android at full price. I've love to but since I have Pro iOS I can't even add on non-Pro Android licenses either. My little app is a labor of love type of thing with a small, niche user base, not something that will ever cover my costs yet I don't want to give up VS and all that muscle memory and familiarity, etc... I can take a little loss each year for side projects but I can't lose $1800/yr.
On the other hand, if you aren't earning at least 10 * $1800/yr, are you really a professional games programmer?
Yes, corporations do not start nice github projects. Indie community would be a good gain.
Now that they've added a profiler as another differentiator the chances of that happening may have improved slightly. They do have 'call us' deals for small/new businesses.
I'm wondering if you would mind sharing what features you miss the most when you are away from Visual Studio? I've not tried it but I'd guess a lot of the editing is possible even if you do wind up stuck using Xamarin Studio for building and debugging.
I've never played enough with Xamarin Studio and only tested Xamarin Business with Visual Studio (I've used a 30 days trial).
Its essentially branded monodevelop with bundled addins(or is mono develop now unbranded xamarin?). In any case, it has improved dramatically over the past couple years. I write services/daemons in it and find the C# functionality to be fantastic now. F# is coming along too.
Thanks for sharing your experience.
Xamarin Studio is definitely rough around the edges but for the most part it seems to get the job done. For example, I've had issues where the update dialog steals the modal focus from the source control dialog(s) and that's basically the end of all interaction with the app until I restarted it.
Having spent some time writing JNI wrappers for a hobby application in Android, I think it depends on what one is trying to achieve.
For hobby purposes and small development, it is expensive and probably is doable doing everything alone.
However, for usual business with short time to market, taking into consideration "time spent on feature" X "hourly rate" per developer time, the prices are quite cheap.
> However, for usual business with short time to market, taking into consideration "time spent on feature" X "hourly rate" per developer time, the prices are quite cheap.
I fully agree, for a business that say makes 100k per year, paying about 2k for a Xamarin Business license is affordable.
An interesting pricing strategy would be:
* Free - for hobbyists, give them complete features and make the resulting executable expire in a few days. This will let them try and play with the tool. After they are comfortable with using C# and Xamarin, they will chose a paid license if they want to make money from their work.
* Indie - same as above for small business (less than 100k per year).
* Pro - same as above plus (paid) support.
Or you could look at Apache Cordova. Support is in CTP now and full release in Visual Studio 2014 hopefully.
Have you shipped an app with Cordova?
Thought so.
I always recommend Cordova to my competitors
Are you seriously comparing JavaScript to F#/C#? Really?
Cordova still has performance problems on Android and even on iOS. Maybe in the future.
Not even close to being the same thing.