I'm looking forward to what they come up with next. There's a tremendous opportunity here to streamline the mobile dev process and things like Mono.Dialog can be a huge time saver.
I figured they were finished after they left Novell but they've pulled off one of the most impressive resurrections in recent tech history.
I've been using Mono for Android for a few months now and have been very impressed with the quality of the product and support, and the rate at which features are being added (modulo Xamarin's small size). I spent my own money on a pro licence and haven't been disappointed.
You claim cross-platform apps, but then you have two development packages. Mono for iOS and Mono for Android. If I develop on Mono for iOS can I take the exact same code and plop it down on the Android version?
I'm using MonoTouch and Mono for Android for some game development right now. My per-platform projects are five to six classes apiece (all but one pushed into my IoC container by the last one), and everything else is shared. Obviously, for a non-game application, you'll have more, but they'll be mostly UI-based.
>Xamarin enables millions of experienced C# programmers to become mobile developers very quickly. But most of them don’t know about us! We’re going to fix that.
I hope step 1 for "fixing that" is a name change. Seriously, developers talk just as much off-line as online about their tools and Xamarin has serious off-line confusion issues.
What you propose wouldn't be "risk free", it would be simply transferring your risk to Xamarin (they have to develop and support users that don't end up paying).
Xamarin puts out a quality product, they should charge a price for it relative to the value it can bring a MOTIVATED developer. And if we want to use it we should pay for it. I don't want to wake up tomorrow to see that they dropped the price to 5 bucks hoping to win on volume only to find out soon afterward that Microsoft paid them 25 million to stop development.
Our free trial never expires and lets you try the platform in the emulator/simulator for as long as you like.
As for the paid product, we issue a no-questions-asked refund to anyone who requests it within some reasonable amount of time (30 days usually). Even with this, our refund rate is less than 1%.
What I meant is actually a different business model, which can co-exist with the current one.
E.g.: "Pay only after you earn your first 100$" but along with "NO WARRANTY" and "no support" and maybe "without IDE, only cmd line tools and SDK" but that would be an extreme - still, better than nothing.
I think this will _tremendously_ boost your user base.
All in all, you will cover a new target market with retaining the existing market.
Anyway, thanks for the great product!
EDIT: the market you actually will loose (in "no support" users) - are the users who didn't succeed. Not sure if you can track the numbers, that would help to determine if this business model will be positive for you.
I'd personally like to see something like a non-commercial/OSS-only "hobbyist" license (maybe $150-200?). I really want to use MonoDroid outside the emulator but don't see myself doing mobile commercially anytime soon, so $400 is tough to swallow.
That said, I totally understand if that's not a market Xamarin wants to be in.
What if your potential customers demanded risk free pricing? They get to use their software for free till they start seeing value. Would you agree to that? If not, why are you expecting Xamarin to do that for you?
Frankly speaking, if 400$ for a product like MonoTouch is risk for you then you probably shouldn't be developing commercial software which you sell for money.
But the corollary is the guy that wants to make a silly app and give it away for free as a hobby. For instance, I wanted to make a very particular kind of timer application for playing Diablo, primarily for myself but give it away, and the $400 price point makes me not want to use monodroid for it. Of course, I'm not really Xamarin's target market per se, and given the post I made about HBO's pricing so I can understand their position. However, as someone that is in the segment of people the OP is talking about, I can sympathize.
If you really want to make silly app, use Objective C + XCode. You still will have to pay 100$ for Apple Developer program.
What I have an objection to is the idea of 'pay if I succeed' model. Clearly the OP is not talking about a silly app given away for free. He wants to make money selling software but refuses to pay for tools which can help him create the software faster.
There at least is a bit of precedent for it, given the Microsoft BizSpark program, and a couple of the game engines are significantly cheaper/free if the company's gross is less than some number. I'm not saying that Xamarin should do that, but it seems like making it cheap/free to lock in the codebase to the Xamarin development stack, and then having a point where they have to eventually pay makes sense.
(and using objective C/XCode are pretty much at the bottom of my list of things I ever want to do in my life)
I'd love to see some kind of "per-app" licensing. I realise it would be difficult to implement, but as a small independent developer, it would be great if I could pay a lower amount but be limited to only releasing one app.
It would also be a good teaser to make me pay the full price once I've used it for a while.
A lot to ask from a small, relatively new company. Xamarin already offer a free trial version (fully functional except deploy to emulator only) and a 30 day money back guarantee after purchasing. You also get a year's updates for free.
That's enterprise pricing, you can get the pro version of Mono Touch for $400. Not "risk free" but definitely reasonable given the opportunity it can afford a developer.
I figured they were finished after they left Novell but they've pulled off one of the most impressive resurrections in recent tech history.