Alpha Anywhere vs. Xamarin

We use Alpha Anywhere to develop large scale business applications. So far, we haven't found any real limitations. This is exemplified by my response to my customers who frequently ask, "Is it possible..." I always interrupt them before this sentence goes any further by telling them, "with our development platform, anything's possible" (then we have to discuss whether the time/cost is worth the added benefit of what they're requesting).

Incentivized

Xamarin is well suited for several reasons. The first, it allows companies to share code across platforms. If the app has a lot of business logic and a fairly simple UI, Xamarin is great for this use case. Xamarin also works well if the developers who will work on the app are already fluent in .NET. Xamarin is less appropriate if the company has a lot of developers. If there are plenty of resources to develop apps natively then the headache of dealing with Xamarin's issues are not worth the effort. If the UI is very complex and has difficult animations it's difficult to debug visual/performance issues in Xamarin.

Incentivized

• We import our medication files.
• We save the patient’s History & Physical documents to S3 buckets. The documents range from 30-300 pages.
• We export billing files to the Medicare mainframe.
• We run over 80 audits on each chart per day.

• We save development time with Xamarin, because we use Xamarin Forms an so we can share most of the code over 3 platforms.
• We can use our C# knowledge to develop iOS and Android Apps.
• Xamarin's integration into Visual Studio is very good and became even better during the last releases of Visual Studio.

Incentivized

• There is no drag and drop form designer however this is not a big problem once you get used to it and through the use of genies, templates, etc.

Incentivized

• Having also done a lot of native mobile development, some of the IDE's features need to emulator their native counterparts. For example, trying to extract a string resource on Android in Xamarin Studio is painful. There are many useful tools in Android Studio that Xamarin should implement.
• Xamarin will always be behind on native platform features. They must catch up when Apple and Google release new platform versions.
• The biggest pain point is the random issues Xamarin continues to have. Having a large code base on top of a native platform makes it very difficult to debug issues. Every developer must decide if its an issue with Xamarin or the native platform. Bugs don't get fixed very quickly. Hopefully that will change with the Microsoft acquisition.

Incentivized

Xamarin has been great for developing different projects efficiently and effectively. It's nice to reuse the core business logic across different platforms so that there are less to maintain and little replications are needed. The biggest benefit is that C# programmers do not have to learn a different language to do mobile development.

Incentivized

If you are required to develop applications that are cross-platformed, Xamarin is a great tool to use. It will help save time and efforts from your development team to be able to build applications seamlessly for android, IOS, windows, and web on a single platform instead of requiring multiple tools to get the job done

Incentivized

I never had to contact support for any help. Most of the problems we ran into, we were able to identify and use peer support through blogs and other internet sources to resolve the problems. There are plenty of sources online which provide tutorials, discuss problems, etc. Example: StackOverflow

Incentivized

Just with any programming tasks, have a plan first. Design out the system, spend time to build it correctly the first time and have plenty of testing and user acceptance opportunities. Xamarin was easy to implement for a C# programmer. However, you need to do tutorials to realize the platform's capabilities.

Incentivized

I stopped evaluating alternate products several years ago as Alpha Anywhere has continued to develop and keep up with technological advances to my satisfaction. Having made the decision to focus development with Alpha Anywhere, I have not looked back and continue to develop at pace for my existing and growing client base.

Xamarin runs natively on MacOS, and the debugger and other integration and auto-complete tools are far better than Eclipse for C# .NET. It also carries much of the plugin/add-on capabilities that are so desirable on Atom. Eclipse is a better for generalized software development, provided a developer is comfortable switching between the IDE the command line for certain parts of their workflow, like building, package management, or debugging. But for C# .NET development on MacOS specifically, Xamarin is the best product I've used for the job.

Incentivized

• We see it is becoming more & more valuable in our business
• Our competition has everything we do, except a Clerking program which we developed in Alpha
• Converting to the Cloud hasn't been cheap for us but we feel it will be well worth it

• Code Sharing - We were able to launch an Android implementation of our app within weeks after finishing iOS. The amount of time taken to develop a new platform is very small.
• Monetization - not the best, but definitely getting better. We've had issues with finding suitable ad networks that work with Xamarin.

Incentivized