How to decide between MonoTouch and Objective-C?

Question

After sitting through a session today on Mono at a local .Net event, the use of MonoTouch was 'touched' upon as an alternative for iPhone development. Being very comfortable in C# and .Net, it seems like an appealing option, despite some of the quirkiness of the Mono stack. However, since MonoTouch costs $400, I'm somewhat torn on if this is the way to go for iPhone development.

Anyone have an experience developing with MonoTouch and Objective-C, and if so is developing with MonoTouch that much simpler and quicker than learning Objective-C, and in turn worth the $400?

Answer 1

If this is the only iPhone app you will ever develop, and you also have zero interest in developing Mac applications, ever, then MonoTouch is probably worth the cost.

If you think you'll ever develop more iPhone apps, or will ever want to do some Mac native development, it's probably worth it to learn Objective-C and the associated frameworks. Plus, if you're the type of programmer that enjoys learning new things, it's a fun new paradigm to study.

Answer 2

I've been using MonoTouch for a few months now, I ported my half finished app from ObjectiveC so I could support Android at some point in the future.

Here's my experience:

Bad bits:

• Xamarin Studio. Indie developers such as myself are forced into using Xamarin Studio. It is getting better every week, the developers are very active on the forums identifying and fixing bugs, but it's still very slow, frequently hangs, has a lot of bugs and debugging is pretty slow also.

• Build times. Building my large (linked) app to debug on a device can take a few minutes, this is compared to XCode which deploys almost immediately. Building for the simulator (non-linked) is a bit quicker.

• MonoTouch issues. I've experienced memory leak issues caused by the event handling, and have had to put in some pretty ugly workarounds to prevent the leaks, such as attaching and detaching events when entering and leaving views. The Xamarin developers are actively looking into issues like this.

• 3rd party libraries. I've spent quite a time converting/binding ObjectiveC libraries to use in my app, although this is getting better with automated software such as Objective Sharpie.

• Larger binaries. This doesn't really bother me but thought I'd mention it. IMO a couple of extra Mb is nothing these days.

Good bits:

• Multi-platform. My friend is happily creating an Android version of my app from my core codebase, we're developing in parallel and are committing to a remote Git repository on Dropbox, it's going well.

• .Net. Working in C# .Net is much nicer than Objective C IMO.

• MonoTouch. Pretty much everything in iOS is mirrored in .Net and it's fairly straight forward to get things working.

• Xamarin. You can see that these guys are really working to improve everything, making development smoother and easier.

I definitely recommend Xamarin for cross platform development, especially if you have the money to use the Business or Enterprise editions that work with Visual Studio.

If you're solely creating an iPhone app that will never be needed on another platform, and you're an Indie developer, I'd stick with XCode and Objective C for now.

Answer 3

I would invest the time in Objective-C mainly because of all the help you can get from sites like this. One of the strength's of Objective-C is that you can use C and C++ code, and there is a lot of projects out there that are well tested.

Another thing is that you're code (language of choice) will be supported by apple. What it iOS 5.x for instance removes the support for a third party solution like MonoTouch? What will you tell your customers then?

Maybe its better to use a platform independent solution like HTML5 if you're not entire ready to move to Objective-C?

Answer 4

Something I'd like to add, even though there's an accepted answer - who is to say that Apple won't just reject apps that have signs of being built with Mono Touch?

Answer 5

As someone with experience with both C# as well as Objective-C, I'd say for most people Xamarin will be well worth the money.

C# is a really good designed language and the C# API's are good designed as well. Of course the Cocoa Touch API's (including UIKit) have great design as well, yet the language could be improved in several ways. When writing in C# you will likely be more productive compared to writing the same code in Objective-C. This is due to several reasons, but some reasons would be:

• C# has type inference. Type inference makes writing code quicker, since you don't have to "know" the type on the left-hand side of an assignment. It also makes refactoring easier and more saver.

• C# has generics, which will reduce errors compared to equivalent Objective-C code (though there are some work-arounds in Objective-C, in most situations developers will avoid them).

• Recently Xamarin added support for Async / Await, which makes writing asynchronous code very easy.

• You'll be able to reuse part of the code base on iOS, Android and Windows Phone.

• MonoTouch largely implements the CocoaTouch API's in a very straightforward way. E.g.: if you've got experience with CocoaTouch, you'll know where to find classes for controls in MonoTouch (MonoTouch.UIKit contains classes for UIButton, UIView, UINavigationController, etc..., likewise MonoTouch.Foundation got classes for NSString, NSData, etc...).

• Xamarin will give users a native experience, unlike solutions like PhoneGap or Titanium.

Now Objective-C has some advantages over C#, but in most situations writing apps in C# will generally result in less develop time and cleaner code and less work to port the same app to other platforms. One notable exception might be high-performance games that rely on OpenGL.

Answer 6

Three words: Linq to SQL

Yes it is well worth the $.