Xamarin’s Acquisition of RoboVM

Question

User10 posted

Today we announced our acquisition of RoboVM. Through this acquisition, Xamarin will be able to fulfill our mission to make it fast, easy, and fun to create great mobile apps for even more developers.

What is RoboVM?

RoboVM is a Java platform for developing native, cross-platform applications for iOS and Android. It has a very similar architecture to Xamarin.iOS, in that it uses ahead of time (AOT) compilation to compile Java bytecode into native ARM binaries, and it exposes 100% of Apple’s iOS APIs so that Java developers can create native iOS apps.

Wait, is Xamarin selling Java now?

C# is a beautiful, advanced language with an incredibly large and passionate developer base that is continuing to adopt Xamarin in large and growing numbers. We have many innovative features in Xamarin today that make our C#-based Xamarin Platform the superior solution for most cross-platform mobile developers today, and we have many exciting developments in store for C# developers on the horizon.

We will operate RoboVM as a separate team and brand so that we can focus solely on the needs of our respective developer communities. If you have questions about RoboVM and Xamarin as they relate to your needs as a developer, please contact us.

Answer 1

User123126 posted

Please say RubyMotion is next :-)

Answer 2

User65389 posted

@JosephHill
Thanks for the posting... basically interesting...

But... you don't think, that you unsettle your existing .Forms customers and it would - maybe - a better idea to push in the money and manpower to make .forms really rock-solid and feature complete...?

Answer 3

User13 posted

Hey Fredy,

We have also grown the Xamarin.Forms team, and our focus is to make it both rock solid and to grow the effort responsibly. Over the spring and summer we focused on reliability across platforms, then we switched to performance, we have added new platforms and we are now back at adding features.

Adding too many people to a project to deliver features is often a recipe for failure, so we grow at the pace that the team is able to grow, this has influenced my thinking on how we evolve and develop software:

https://www.cs.virginia.edu/~evans/greatworks/mythical.pdf

Miguel

Answer 4

User75318 posted

@MigueldeIcaza Could you give us some examples on how this acquisition will benefit the existing Xamarin users ?

Answer 5

User74 posted

I dont know anything about RoboVM other than what I have read about this acquisition on The Register, but one point:

RoboVM also offers a custom Java-to-native bridge, called Bro, which lets you wrap native C or Objective-C functions in Java code using annotations.

I would very much like to see this exposed in C#!

EDIT: Congrats on the purchase btw!

Answer 6

User181 posted

@JohnHair, this is Bro. We already have that. It's called a Binding Library, and it's the same mechanism Xamarin uses to bind all of the iOS APIs.

Answer 7

User181 posted

Oh, I guess it's different in Java. I second that, then!

Answer 8

User75318 posted

And 6 months later RoboVm is discontinued http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/04/15/microsoftdiscontinuesrobovm/