Xamarin may now be a viable tool for cost-efficient hybrid app development since it’s recent acquisition by Microsoft.

The current app marketplace is highly competitive and as the general startup market cools in

terms of funding, launch runway for apps is going to be even more important to early stage startups. Xamarin may allow cash-strapped startups to leverage code-reuse and the large pool of global C# developers while targeting both iOS and Android.

In general, developing an app natively for both platforms will nearly double the cost of client-side development and require a team to staffed with developers well-versed in Java as well as

Swift / Objective-C. Even with today’s outsourcing resources, the cost of this duplicated effort can stretch the budget of many startups.

Microsoft’s challenge will be finding a way to keep Xamarin attractive to mobile developers ontoday’s leading platforms by keeping up with the innovations and platform updates brought by future iOS and Android versions. They have to not only keep up with Apple and Google but also attract developers to develop apps for Windows 10, something that has to date proven near impossible.