Xamarin has long offered innovative mobile development tools, and a recent announcement furthers Xamarin's presence in the space. Scott Guthrie revealed in a Feb. 24, 2016 blog post that Microsoft has acquired Xamarin. This is a bold move, and coupled with Microsoft’s ownership of Visual Studio, signals a clear focus on providing an excellent mobile development experience. What’s neat is that Xamarin lets developers develop for mobile in C#, and thus create cross-platform apps with ease.

This acquisition is a new beginning for Xamarin—the company and its products—and is an opportunity to help many, many more developers build great apps...Microsoft’s mobile-first, cloud-first strategy is a great match for the Xamarin products and team. -- Nat Friedman, Xamarin CEO and Cofounder

Rather than concentrating on just one platform, Xamarin instead offers the functionality to use app code across Android, iOS, and Windows platforms. Since launching its line of Windows mobile devices, both phones and tablets, Microsoft has continued to migrate into the mobile space, but has not seen strong adoption of the Universal Windows Platform. By obtaining Xamarin, Microsoft will strengthen its value proposition for mobile developers without requiring an increasingly less likely platform shift -- and no doubt keep .NET libraries even more up to date than Xamarin could manage on its own.

Xamarin acquisition makes #Microsoft a must-consider #mobile development option: https://t.co/MtcmGxgHrt

— Forrester ( @forrester) February 24, 2016

Nat Friedman, CEO and Cofounder of Xamarin, explained that joining Microsoft is a major step for the Xamarin team. Microsoft’s onus on cloud and mobile meshes perfectly with Xamarin’s continuing mission of helping C# developers, as well as providing native cross-platform APIs.

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