Microsoft finally acquires iOS, Android dev tool vendor

The company declares “the combination of Xamarin, Visual Studio, Visual Studio Team Services, and Azure delivers a complete mobile app dev solution that provides everything a developer needs to develop, test, deliver and instrument mobile apps for every device”.

Microsoft today announced plans to acquire Xamarin, a San Francisco-based startup that lets developers build applications for a variety of different platforms using Microsoft’s C# programming language. Terms of the deal haven’t been disclosed; it’s expected to close in the next month.

Microsoft has bought its long-time partner Xamarin for an undisclosed sum.

To meet the challenge of getting more iPhone and Android apps onto Windows 10, Microsoft has invested heavily in technology that helps developers translate their apps to Windows more seamlessly.

The four-year-old Xamarin’s unique approach to cross-platform mobile development uses the.NET-centric C# language to create one codebase to use across iOS, Android, Mac and Windows platforms, making it a natural fit for Microsoft and Visual Studio. “Xamarin customer satisfaction scores were incredibly strong”.

“With today’s acquisition announcement we will be taking this work much further to make our world-class developer tools and services even better with deeper integration and to enable seamless mobile app dev experiences”, said Scott Guthrie, VP of Microsoft’s cloud and enterprise group.

Microsoft has purchased Xamarin, a startup that helps developers write apps once and have them work on any smartphone or operating system, according to an official blog entry.

Reached by e-mail, Ignition partner John Connors says, “This was a very good outcome for Xamarin team, Microsoft, and investors”.

Xamarin has been expanding in recent years, in part through the acquisitions of companies like RoboVM (for Java development) and LessPainful (in mobile user-interface testing). Xamarin’s tools assist Microsoft’s campaign to increase the developer pool for its mobile environments.

The acquisition is MIcrosoft’s latest move to maintain relevance in mobile-app development, a field dominated by rivals Apple and Google.