Breaking: Microsoft acquires Xamarin, a leading platform provider for mobile app development

Microsoft today announced that they have acquired Xamarin, a leading platform provider for mobile app development. Xamarin has more than 15,000 customers in 120 countries and more than 1.3 million unique developers are using their technology. This is a great news for developers and Microsoft. Along with Visual Studio, Xamarin provides a rich mobile development offering that enables developers to build mobile apps using C# and deliver fully native mobile app experiences to all major devices – including iOS, Android, and Windows. Apart from their platform, 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’s approach enables developers to take advantage of the productivity and power of .NET to build mobile apps, and to use C# to write to the full set of native APIs and mobile capabilities provided by each device platform. This enables developers to easily share common app code across their iOS, Android and Windows apps while still delivering fully native experiences for each of the platforms. Xamarin’s unique solution has fueled amazing growth for more than four years.

Microsoft acquiring Xamarin is not a surprising news given their longstanding partnership. They have previously worked on Xamarin integration into Visual Studio, Microsoft Azure, Office 365 and our Enterprise Mobility Suite to provide developers with an end-to-end workflow for native, secure apps across platforms.

“The combination of Xamarin, Visual Studio, Visual Studio Team Services, and Azure delivers a complete mobile app dev solution that provides everything a developer needs to develop, test, deliver and instrument mobile apps for every device,” said Scott Guthrie, EVP at Microsoft.