Microsoft has updated Xamarin.Essentials and has revealed its plans for Xamarin.Forms once .NET MAUI Essentials arrives this fall. Alongside more details of MAUI, Microsoft says it will end updates to the Xamarin mobile app development platform in November 2022.

Xamarin has been the Microsoft technology for developers to use if they want to develop apps for iOS and Android using C#. It is based on Mono, the open source implementation of Microsoft's .NET Framework. NET MAUI, the .NET Multi-platform App UI, a framework for building native device applications spanning mobile, tablet, and desktop.

The latest announcement included some improvements for Xamarin.Essentials, Microsoft's single cross-platform API that works with any iOS, Android, or UWP application that can be accessed from shared code, and provides file access, device info, and support for hardware features.

The details of Microsoft's plans to move to .NET MAUI as the future of Xamarin.Forms and .NET MAUI Essentials as the future of Xamarin.Essentials, start with the direct integration of .NET MAUI Essentials into .NET MAUI starting with .NET 6 Preview 6 and .NET MAUI Preview 6. When you create a new .NET MAUI application, it will use the new .NET MAUI workload.

Acknowledging that a lot of developers will want to continue developing Xamarin.iOS and Xamarin.Android apps, and moving them to .NET 6 without .NET MAUI, Microsoft says this is still possible.

However, while Xamarin.Essentials will continue being serviced until November 2022, including pull requests fixing bugs and publishing new service releases, new features and APIs will only be added to .NET MAUI Essentials going forward. The roadmap for MAUI in .NET gives details of what features will be added and the point they're due. 

The main improvement to Xamarin.Essentials was for iOS developers using the Web Authenticator, which can be used to add authentication to apps and integrate with many providers using your own server backend powered by ASP.NET Core. For iOS developers, there's a new private authentication session option using the new web browser API for developers introduced in iOS 13 to launch the authentication session as private. This enables developers to request that no shared cookies or browsing data is available between authentication sessions and will be a fresh login session each time.

More Information

Xamarin Forms Website

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