Does anyone has recent experience with Maui targeting mobile? It had a not-quite-caught-up-to-Xamarin reputation for a while, has that changed now that we're on .Net 8?

It is a complete rewrite with all the caveats it entails.

Plus on Apple platforms it relies on Catalist, while most likely it will never do Linux.

Additionally, now outside of Windows, the best Microsoft can think of is using VSCode, or let JetBrains do the needful.

As such I don't see it to gain adoption beyond the .NET shops that were already deeply invested into Xamarin.

What's wrong with VSCode in this context?

Everything, when it comes down to using Electron crap for developing desktop and mobile GUI applications, including having a designer with drag and drop support.

It has some obscure bugs during build process (You need to have project in C:/ if you are on Windows), but otherwise it runs fine for Windows and Android. It also runs fine on MacOS, but you need to compile on MacOS as I did not figure out how to emit PKG file on Windows. It also runs fine on XCode iOS emulator, but I don't have iOS device to test on.

In nutshell, I think that MAUI has some pains to get used to, but when you make it working on one platform, it usually works on remaining platforms as well. Only thing which I don't like is HUGE binaries it generates (60-200MB) but I guess that's a price to pay for simple deployment on multiple platforms.

I've been porting a Blazor/.net 8 project (https://interro.bot) to Maui for the past couple months. I just released Android last week, and Mac/iOS is in the pipeline. There are plenty of gotchas and I wouldn't say Maui feels mature yet, but the issues in my case are mostly on the build side. I'm optimistic though, the platform does improve with regular releases, and the end product (once through the build headaches) is solid.

Are you using Blazor Hybrid or are you going native? I've been trying to learn Avalonia and already moved away from ReactiveUI in favor of MVVM. My server application is built in Blazor, so kinda wondering how well concepts transfer over.

This project started back in the day as native MVVM (UWP). Switched to Blazor Server/electron a few years back. For Maui, I had to move to Hybrid but I'm glad I did. Hybrid is pretty great, seems better in every way except routing and some aspnet functionality is lost. Faster app startups, and feels generally more responsive.

Avalonia looks pretty nice, but I've never tried it so I'm not sure how it compares.

Bitwarden people had some info about it. They decided to make native apps instead

https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitwarden/comments/1b32bbz/going_na...

It was the first ever offering from them where I could create a new project for mobile and hit f5 and it actually ran :D

I built an iPad app for a fun little three letter government agency. It wasn't bad at all.

I've moved on to Uno Platform. It runs on more platforms. such as Linux and WebAssembly, and it actually supports pure C# markup, which is what I always wanted. I know XAML by heart but I love, love the simplicity of using C#.

Embrace (or acquire). Extend (optional). Extinguish.

In this case the last E is Evolve. Xamarin got refactored and renamed to Maui.

It remains to be seen, Miguel de Icaza wasn't in agreement with "Evolve".

He is now focused on Apple technologies due to the way the acquisition turned out to be.