Qt or Xamarin ?

[Sunita Marshal]

Hi
I'm interested in cross-platform mobile app development. I've C++ C# background - so naturally my choices are Qt and Xamarin. As I've seen in my past career that native C++ apps perform better in comparison to the managed code on desktop. But for mobiles, there are confusing statements in general. My development would be mostly for Android. But someone told the JNI calls Qt relies on badly affect the performance on Android - However for iOS, there is no such issue. That's why I need Qt people's expert opinion in this regard to help choose my future career with Qt or Xamarin.

Thanks

[sierdzio]

I've worked on projects which used JNI a lot but didn't notice any performance problems.

[Sunita Marshal]

@sierdzio , thanks for sharing your experience.

Did you use Qt in your projects or just a bare bone C++? Were they QML or traditional QWidgets projects?

[sierdzio]

Yes, I've used Qt, I always do. They were all QML projects, for both iOS and Android. Widgets are more suited for desktop platforms.

JNI was not used there heavily - usually 90% of functionality is provided by Qt and only some fringe functionalities need to be provided by Android (like file sharing, Intents etc.).

[Sunita Marshal]

That's great!
But I had an impression the Qt's most functionality comes from underlying JNI calls on Android. Thanks, you cleared the things :)