Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT) To Give Out Xamarin For Free

Andy Parker
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Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT) To Give Out Xamarin For Free

Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT) has announced that it will be giving away Xamarin on a free basis.

The announcement means that every Visual Studio user will now have access to the Xamarin Studio for free. The free offer applies to all the Visual Studio Editions including Visual Studio Enterprise, Visual Studio Professional and the Visual Studio Community Edition. The free status will also be extended to Xamarin Studio for OS X from Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL) through the community edition.

The free availability of Xamarin means developers create can test apps without the need for multiple operating systems and different programming tools. More than 15,000 customers are subscribed to Xamarin including major companies such as JetBlue Airways Corporation (NASDAQ:JBLU) and The Coca-Cola Co (NYSE:KO). Xamarin has more than 1.3 million developers using it to develop mobile apps.

Microsoft’s acquisition of Xamarin a month ago was a clear indicator that the company was acknowledging other operating systems especially Android from Alphabet Inc (NASDAQ:GOOG) iOS from Apple. During a recent keynote, Xamarin’s founder Miguel De Icaza stated that he was pleased to be part of Microsoft. The announcement about the services being offered on a free basis was also made at the keynote, and it was highly applauded. It means future apps released on the Xamarin supported platforms will be compatible with both iOS and Android.

Developers and other attendees were clearly pleased with the announcement because it means a great deal for the future of mobile apps. Microsoft has teamed up with Xamarin numerous times in the past, and their compatibility warranted an acquisition in line with the plans of the two firms. The company has also promised that Xamarin SDK will be open sourced as part of the .Net foundation. It will be available under the MIT License together with Mono. Microsoft has also announced that RedHat, JetBrains, and Unity have also joined the .Net foundation. Xamarin was the first to pioneer the .Net framework to iOS and Android developers.