Rumored for almost two years, Microsoft finally made their acquisition of Xamarin, a leading cross platform development platform led by Miguel de Icaza, official today with a blog post coming from Scott Guthrie.
In the post, Guthrie details some of Xamarin’s work in enabling developers to share common code across iOS, Android and Windows apps “while still delivering fully native experiences for each of the platforms”, an amazing four year journey:
Xamarin has more than 15,000 customers in 120 countries, including more than one hundred Fortune 500 companies – and more than 1.3 million unique developers have taken advantage of their offering. Top enterprises such as Alaska Airlines, Coca-Cola Bottling, Thermo Fisher, Honeywell and JetBlue use Xamarin, as do gaming companies like SuperGiant Games and Gummy Drop. Through Xamarin Test Cloud, all types of mobile developers—C#, Objective-C, Java and hybrid app builders —can also test and improve the quality of apps using thousands of cloud-hosted phones and devices. Xamarin was recently named one of the top startups that help run the Internet.
Microsoft has been in partnership with Xamarin for quite some time, building integration into Visual Studio, Azure, Office 365 and the Enterprise Mobility Suite, but the acquisition, long anticipated by developers and Microsoft watchers as one that just made sense, will make a continuation of that integration a certainty.
Guthrie promises lots more news at Build, coming in just more than a month, and we’ll be there to bring you all the latest.
