What Mobile App Dev Tools Are There?

If you mean Frameworks for building Mobile apps the two I hear mentioned the most at the moment are

React Native
Ionic

But they are tons out there if you search for 'hybrid app frameworks'

If developing for a specific OS. Android, iOS, Windows etc I am pretty sure they all offer free dev environments, although you do have to pay for a Apple Dev license to publish to their store and need a Mac to do so (i think).
 
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Xamarin is free now. Compiles to native and you use .net which is always a pleasure to work in. Can use visual studio too instead of xamarin studio for it. Will do ios, android and of course windows phone.

I've been using it for work recently and it's great. I think it was a bit problematic and buggy years ago when it first came out but it's come a long way and is only getting better, especially with the recent Microsoft acquisition. Very good product now.
 
We code all our apps natively, Visual Studio - Windows Phone, Android Studio - Android and XCode - iOS but we're very very tempted by Xamarin next time around especially now it's free and owned by Microsoft. We have a fair few apps and having to port them to three platforms is a bit of a faff.

I can't stand xcode/objective-C/swift so being able to write in C# is awesome. Whoever designed those languages seriously needs shooting :/.
 
Realm has just come out too for Xamarin and that allows you to write cross platform database access very easily.

It's only going to get better with Xamarin :D.
 
Pho said:
I can't stand xcode/objective-C/swift so being able to write in C# is awesome. Whoever designed those languages seriously needs shooting :/.
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You must have not given Swift a chance, Swift is a fantastic language. Don't knock it until you have given something a good chance. (Yes I've worked in c# a while ago so I have room to compare)
 
To be fair I last tried it a few months back and I think they're released a new version of it since. I just found it very difficult to get my head around it (I can usually pickup language quickly), but then I'm not a big fan of iOS/OSX which probably didn't help given I very rarely use those devices so spent most of my time trying to figure out basic stuff.

I still prefer C#/Java :p.
 
I use C#, VB.net and Delphi for work, had a go with swift 2 and it was a bit of strange one but it has some good stuff. I had to convert a C# Xamarin app and it ended up been easier than the way C# works. This was before Xamarin was acquired by MS, now I would not need to convert the app's.
 
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