Xamarin Announces Immediate Availability of .NET-based Mobile Development Platform

CAMBRIDGE, Mass., July 18, 2011 /PRNewswire/ -- Xamarin today announced the immediate availability of MonoTouch and Mono for Android from the Xamarin web store. Through an agreement with SUSE*, a business unit of The Attachmate Group (the company that acquired Novell in April 2011), Xamarin has a broad, perpetual license to all intellectual property covering Mono*, MonoTouch, Mono for Android and Mono Tools for Visual Studio. Xamarin will also provide technical support to SUSE customers using Mono-based products and assume stewardship of the Mono open source project.

Xamarin's Mono-based products enable .NET developers to use their existing code, libraries and tools (including Visual Studio*), as well as skills in .NET and the C# programming language, to create mobile applications for the industry's most widely-used mobile devices, including Android*-based smartphones and tablets, iPhone*, iPad* and iPod* Touch.

"The confluence of transformations taking place today in both front-end client devices and back-end cloud services is expected to lead to healthy growth in application development technologies," says Al Hilwa, research director for Application Development Software at IDC. "Application development tools and runtimes which support multiple mobile platforms and tap into sizeable existing developer ecosystems are expected to lead this growth."

Xamarin's development products simplify mobile application development by allowing developers to use .NET and C# to write cross-platform apps that take full advantage of the unique native capabilities of the underlying platform.

"Our mission is to make it fast, easy and fun to build great mobile apps, whether for individual consumers or for enterprises," said Nat Friedman, founder and CEO, Xamarin. "Since the introduction of MonoTouch in 2009, developers have experienced how Mono can streamline mobile application development. Xamarin will continue to innovate to deliver incredible experiences to iOS and Android developers."

Xamarin engineers are already at work on stability improvements and performance optimizations, and maintenance updates will be released to customers imminently.  Additionally, a number of major improvements for MonoTouch and Mono for Android, including support for iOS 5, Xcode 4 and Android Honeycomb, will be released in the coming months.

MonoTouch, Mono for Android and Mono Tools for Visual Studio customers will receive support and updates directly from Xamarin for the remainder of their subscription period.  Today, Xamarin introduces a priority support option for mobile products. Customers who upgrade to MonoTouch Enterprise Priority and Mono for Android Enterprise Priority will receive access to the priority support queue and a guaranteed response time.

Xamarin will also assume stewardship of the Mono, MonoDevelop and Moonlight open source projects. In addition, the agreement with SUSE ensures current and future SUSE (formerly Novell) customers hosting applications on SUSE Linux Enterprise Mono Extension application server will continue to receive full commercial support for their platform from SUSE, backed by Xamarin.

"We are very pleased to enter into this agreement with Xamarin because our customers deserve nothing less than the brightest team of experts to provide ongoing maintenance and support for our commercial Mono products," said Nils Brauckmann, president and general manager of SUSE.

About Xamarin

Xamarin was founded in 2011 with the mission to make mobile development incredibly fast and easy.  Xamarin's products simplify creation of mobile applications targeting multiple platforms, including iOS and Android.  Founded and staffed by many notable developers from the open source community, Xamarin is also steward to the Mono project - the open source, cross-platform implementation of C# and the .NET framework.  For more information, visit http://xamarin.com

*All third-party trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

SOURCE Xamarin