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Use Xamarin To Speed Mobile App Deployments

September 27th, 2017  by by Peter Theunissen

Aprico Consultants can help you develop compelling mobile apps and services by leveraging the Xamarin Mobile Application Development technology This cross-platform offering lets your development teams write code in C# and quickly converts it into native iOS, Android, and Windows Phone apps.

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That’s why Aprico Consultants can help you develop compelling mobile apps and services by leveraging the Xamarin Mobile Application Development technology. This cross-platform offering lets your development teams write code in C# and quickly converts it into native iOS, Android, and Windows Phone apps. What’s more, Aprico’s architectural blueprint and out-of-the-box accelerators can vastly reduce the effort needed to design and implement mobile apps. Code Once, Deploy Anywhere The Xamarin Mobile Application Development technology allows you to leverage your organization’s existing C# development skills and expertise to deliver Android, iOS and Windows apps with native performance. From a single code base in C#, apps are turned into native code for target mobile devices. Sixty to seventy-five percent of the code, for example, is usually common to Android and iOS. The other twenty-five to forty percent can then be handed to user experience people for creating fully native UIs customized for each platform. By using Xamarin, your team develops its apps once, creates reusable elements and distributes them on multiple platforms, accelerating your time to market. Build: The Xamarin studio – now integrated in the Visual Studio IDE -- gives you access to all iOS, Android and Windows Phone platform-specific device functionality to deliver truly native apps. You can create iOS and Android projects, e.g. define screens, flows, images and any other media, while reusing the code from one platform to another. The result? Significantly reduced development time and end-user training. The Xamarin.Forms is a cross-platform UI toolkit that lets you easily create native user interface layouts that can be shared across Android, iOS and Windows Phone. In addition, you can customize the user interface in each platform by creating specific views with Xamarin.iOS and Xamarin.Android. Xamarin.Forms includes more than 40 controls and layouts, which are mapped to native controls at runtime. Integrate: Back-end software and services are what delivers real productivity. With Xamarin, you can easily integrate new apps with legacy apps and data sources, depending on where your back-end data is stored: in the cloud, on-premise, or both. Microsoft web Apps, in particular, let you rapidly build, deploy and manage back-end services supporting your mobile applications. Many mobile-optimized cloud services functions, such as identity and security, off-line data synchronization and locations-based messaging, can be introduced with a few clicks. You can also quickly build and consume APIs in the cloud using the language of your choice. As part of its Mobile Framework, Aprico has abstracted messaging system support for major suppliers, making it easy to implement push notification in the Azure back-end. We also support full offline mode, providing native sync experience across your iOS, Android and Windows apps. Test: The vast array of devices and OS variants, as well as their associated emulators, creates major testing challenges. Mobile apps must undergo tests across multiple form factors and operating systems, including UX functionality and flow under a range of conditions, such as offline, WiFi or cellular network operations. Xamarin takes care of most of this tedious work. It lets you test every new feature and perform comprehensive regression tests from the UI down to ensure high quality releases. For example, you can automatically run UI tests locally or execute them on Xamarin Test Cloud where they can run on thousands of physical devices. Xamarin Test Cloud’s parallelization feature can split test runs and execute them across multiple devices simultaneously, increasing testing speed and frequency. Reports give you the details that you need to know when a test fails, including statistics about UI, memory usage, duration, CPU usage and overall navigation. Deploy Software deployment can be a repetitive and sometimes fastidious task. That’s why Xamarin orchestrates deployments across multiple targets and perform rolling updates. Once you create a new build, for example, it automatically gets sent through a testing phase, and then onto the deploy phase. Delivery options can include different OS, public, private, and hybrid cloud deployments, or on-premise solutions if your organization has specific governance or regulatory requirements. Hockey Apps, in particular, is great for distributing your apps in a unified way for all platform end-users. You can distribute beta versions, collect live crash reports, get feedback from real users, and analyze test coverage. Continuous integration, automated testing, distribution, monitoring and engagement capabilities give you faster release cycles. Bugs, app crashes, or code failures can be detected and fixed much faster than with traditional development methods. Detailed data results let you rapidly determine where and why issues show up, and decide when you should focus your efforts to respond quickly. What’s more, you’ll appreciate the Notification Hub. This multi-platform push engine integrates the different providers’ native push systems. It lets you engage your users via push notifications, by sending them targeted messages at the right time. Fast-Track Approach: At Aprico, we have implemented a Mobile Framework for using Xamarin technology to reduce costs and increase performance. It addresses the complete mobile app development life cycle  -- from development and testing to deployment. For more information on how to accelerate the delivery of your mobile apps, call 02.712.05.92.
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