Development cost

Finally, technical feasibility is another important aspect of objectively analyzing the design requirements of an application. In some cases, the development costs of creating a custom control to mimic a web application outweighs the business or platform value added to the native counterpart of the same application.

Each mobile platform that Xamarin and Xamarin.Forms target offers a different user experience and a different set of controls. Xamarin.Forms create an abstraction on top of this set of native controls so that the same abstraction is rendered using native views on a specific platform. In this context, trying to introduce new design elements or customize controls that are inherently different in appearance and behave like each other can have costly repercussions.

For instance, if the web counterpart of the application uses a checkbox for a certain preference, the mobile view to use in this case would be a toggle switch. Insisting on a checkbox would mean additional development hours, as well as an undesirable user experience on the target platform. Similarly, using checkboxes for (multi) selection rather than highlighting the selected content can lead to UX degradation for the specific mobile platform and platform users: