React Native, Titanium, or FireMonkey: Choosing the Alternative to Xamarin for your App

There are plenty of contenders in the battle for supremacy in cross-platform app development, but if you're planning to build mobile enterprise apps and want to give users that native experience, your choices become a little more limited.

Essentially, you will need to work with Xamarin or a Xamarin alternative such as Embarcadero FireMonkey, Appcelerator Titanium, or React Native.

However, there is a reason why software providers like Xamarin development company Iflexion stake their reputations on the Microsoft-owned platform. They simply believe there's no better tool out there at the moment for building enterprise apps that perform well on any mobile operating system.

Xamarin's most important strength lies in the way it allows developers to use a single language (C#) to code the core logic of an app, which can then be ported to all major operating systems. This ability to reuse code saves a lot of time, making for a shorter overall development cycle.

Xamarin integrates user interfaces using a separate development component called Xamarin.Forms. When combined with the sharing of core logic, this enables more than two thirds of code to be reused across platforms, resulting in an almost perfect WORA solution for creating enterprise apps.

That percentage of code-reuse is not just a Xamarin marketing claim. It's a figure cited by many app development experts, like Microsoft Regional Director Adam Cogan, who wrote a piece on his blog outlining a development project in which an incredible 96% of source code was reused.

The release of Xamarin.Forms bridged the gap in the capabilities of earlier Xamarin versions, making it easy to create native user interfaces for multiple mobile operating systems. Prior to that improvement, it might have been easier for alternative cross-platform solutions to hold a candle to Xamarin in this aspect of app development.

However, even since the arrival of Xamarin.Forms, some of the alternative tools compete pretty well when it comes to UI development. Titanium, for example, enables native UIs to be created for Android and iOS, although it's not a good solution for complex applications due to the use of JavaScript. Xamarin, on the other hand, makes use of C#—a language better equipped for complex mobile development tasks.

FireMonkey takes a different approach to UI design, by drawing all controls with a graphics API instead of calling the native APIs for individual controls. The result, whilst potentially very good-looking, has less of a native look and feel than that achieved with Xamarin.

React Native is perhaps the best Xamarin alternative when it comes to UI design. Users report that this platform makes it simple to design and build true native user interfaces that perform, despite the use of JavaScript, which is typically considered slower than native code.

Thus far we've concentrated on comparisons with the best aspects of Xamarin, but like all software, it has its drawbacks too. The weaknesses of Xamarin (as claimed by critics) tend to relate to the performance of apps created with the platform. It's claimed that the extra software overhead required by Xamarin results in heavier apps that can be slow to download and start.

While this may be true to a degree, the overall app performance at least on iOS is considerably faster than apps created using many other development tools. However, app launch times are in the main, slightly slower for apps created with Xamarin than those developed using Titanium.

React Native is a JavaScript framework, so you can expect app launch times to be slower than Xamarin. As for FireMonkey, reports on Stack Overflow suggest that app launch times are fairly slow when this platform is used for development.

In terms of app size, Xamarin and Titanium apps are generally similar for Android devices, but the similarity ends when developing apps for iOS, as Titanium apps require significantly more real estate on Apple devices.

Of course, a brief article like this can only scratch the surface in comparing the pros and cons of Xamarin’s alternative solutions. Your company's needs and preferences will depend on many factors, including your mobile OS priorities and access to development resources.

For instance, if you plan to invest in Xamarin development, you will need experts who are skilled in the C# programming language, who are not nearly so easy to find as, say, Javascript developers.

If you won't be developing your mobile apps internally, you'll need to find a development company that works with the tool you prefer. The one thing that's certain is if you choose Xamarin, you'll find plenty of developers who have dedicated the last few years to perfecting their expertise in this immensely popular and capable enterprise-app development suite.