Yep, we moved away because MS themselves are simply not serious about it.

Cross-platform development is like communism. An unattainable utopia. There's no "magicking-away" the idiosyncrasies of cross-platform development with abstraction layers. It's simpler to use native tools and go for the best each platform has to offer while keeping the L&F UX as similar as possible.

React Native and (arguably) Flutter are going through a golden age right now. Major companies like Tesla, Coinbase, and Shopify have adopted them, and the developer experience has never been better. I'm not sure why it worked now, but didn't work for Xamarin / Ionic, though.

For Xamarin I would answer that with: Flutter and React native are 'light' on the developer: you get instant feedback. Xamarin, at least when we dropped it 2 years ago, was really slow and, besides c# which we will use on the server, hardly pleasant or light. I think these days, the developer needs a smooth experience (once the tons of crap has been installed and set up, which is why I prefer Flutter over react native) so things that are not that will fall over. I think, after that, comes author influence: so if you take that, you get to RN, Flutter, Xamarin, Ionic if you sort them by EasyOfDev,AuthorInfluence.

Popularity means popularity. It doesn't mean utility. There are plenty of dumb things large companies use. OTOH, there are also many unsexy, little-known, ubiquitous technologies essential to certain sectors of the economy.

I've never used it in anger, but I thought Xamarin probably had the most pragmatic approach. Their recommended path was to have a common core of business logic, but to build native UIs for each platform you wanted to support hooked into that logic.

There's a new project called MAUI that also handles desktop: https://github.com/dotnet/maui

It's basically rebranded Xamarin Forms. Outside of bundled Windows apps, Microsoft is going all into web technologies for consumer apps now. Even within bundled Windows apps usage of .net is almost nonexistent. Built in OneDrive client is written in Qt!

It's really sad to me that Xamarin doesn't get more love and adoption.

It's slow, bugged as hell and the result is subpar compared to a real native app... At least it was like that when I tried it (again) 3/5 years ago

My SO just finished a term project that used Xamarin.Forms. Conceptually the framework is perfect then you actually use it and want to off yourself. MAUI, if taken seriously and isn't only a rebrand, could be quite an accomplishment and a great tool.

I'm not sure about the state of Xamarin Forms these days, but back when I worked with it a few years ago even the sample apps had memory leaks on iOS. I agree that conceptually it was amazing, as was Xamarin itself. If Forms doesn't have leaks these days it would definitely be a great way to build cross-platform apps.

This is how MS divided.