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0 pointsbscphil5y ago0 comments

An irritating thing about Uno is that I heard about it for the first time in this thread, and I'm finding it basically impossible to figure out how well it meets the requirement of this thread: cross-platform GUI.

Their main page says that it's cross-platform, but doesn't have any screenshots of a simple application running on every platform. If you go to [1] you'll see that most of the programs they feature are Android + iOS only, not even desktop platforms. Of the few that do, most seem to be Windows only, and a few run on the Mac, but look horrific on that platform. [2] Not a single one of their showcase programs runs on Linux. What's up with this, shouldn't the whole point of a showcase for a cross-platform UI framework be to show off applications that run on every supported platform?

If you start digging into the docs [3], you immediately find pages that mention only iOS, Android, UWP, and WebAssembly as supported platforms. The "developers" dropdown on the main page has Android, iOS, Web, macOS and Windows 7?? Even their code samples [4], hilariously, only run on a few platforms and don't seem to link to any actual code?

[1] https://platform.uno/showcases/

[2] https://apps.apple.com/us/app/uno-calculator/id1464736591

[3] https://platform.uno/docs/articles/getting-started/requireme...

[4] https://platform.uno/code-samples/

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JamesSwift5y ago

I do a lot of app dev and recently looked into Uno to see what it was because I was also confused.

Uno is sort of an alternative to Xamarin.Forms aimed at windows developers that aren't happy that Xamarin.Forms uses a non-standard XAML. Uno uses UWP XAML, which is preferred by these users.

The way I like to think of the two frameworks is that Uno is a cross-platform framework that aims to align systems to the Windows way of doing things, while Xamarin.Forms is more of a "do iOS/Android" in same codebase and just happens to also support windows. There is unique value props in each framework (e.g. Uno also targets WASM and Xamarin.Forms targets Samsung Tizen).

Here is a good high level of Uno: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fyo2BI4rn0g

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