Top 50 Reasons to use Uno Platform – 2022 edition

In October 2019 we published a top-50 list of reasons to use Uno Platform. Since then, we’ve had 18 releases so, it’s about time we update the list. Here is the new top-50 list, in no particular order – all of them are great.  There are lots of new list additions while retaining some of the gems from the initial list: 

Top 50 reasons to use Uno Platform

  1. Go from Figma designs to XAML code in seconds.  

  2. Use XAML in our VS Code plugin to write WebApps 

  3. There is a Pluralsight course on Uno Platform, accessible even with a 10-day Pluralsight trial. 

  4. We made your favorite NuGet Package Explorer into a WebApp 

  5. We ship a new version every 6 weeks (8 per year). Your updates come in fast! 

  6. Never write Objective-C again  

  7. Never bootstrap an app from scratch anymore – use Uno.Extensions for common tasks like serialization, navigation, reactive UI and more 

  8. It already supports WebAssembly threading and.net 7 

  9. Vibrant community of over 250 contributors, of whom 25 are Microsoft MVPs  

  10. Reminder – it is It is Open Source and Free – under Apache 2.0   

  11. Build cross-platform apps that natively support touch, mouse, keyboard, and pen 

  12. Uno Platform apps are pixel-perfect, all while allowing you incredible choice for rendering UI.  

  13. One codebase – 6 different platforms – need we say more? 

  14. It’s popular – 2,000,000 downloads on NuGet. 

  15. Third party UI controls support from Syncfusion, Infragistics, LiveCharts and Lightning Chart  

  16. Udemy course on Uno Platform is free 

  17. No XAML needed if you don’t want it – Enjoy a Flutter-like UI development experience with C# and .NET Hot Reload by using C# for Markup 

  18. We ship with day-0 support for WinUI / WinAppSDK. Be at the forefront of WinUI and the future of Microsoft UI developer stack  

  19. We also ship as close as possible to .NET – both official releases and previews so you can always use the latest and greatest .NET ecosystems has to offer.  

  20. It is mature and battle-tested on hundreds of apps built over the past 8 years  

  21. Uno Platform Docs are 37 Great Gatsby’s long 

  22. Our CTO Jerome Laban Live- codes on Twitch every week  

  23. We give back – we sponsor .NET Foundation, .NET Conf and dozens of user groups around the world. OSS community FTW!  

  24. It can help port code from 20 years ago to iOS, Android, Web and macOS – like we did with the Windows Calculator  

  25. Our annual conference, UnoConf, is held in Montreal, Canada – a perfect excuse for you to come the Canadian capital for food, comedy, architecture, music, people and fashion 

  26. It supports Progressive Web Apps (PWA)  

  27. Mix and Match XAML controls and Native components at will  

  28. We made sure it is sustainable in the long term via professional support for those who need it  

  29. Even Microsoft contributes to Uno Platform  

  30. It allows you to leverage your existing C# and XAML skill set to build apps for iOS, Android, Web, Linux and MacOS.  

  31. It comes with Uno Toolkit –  a set of higher-level UI Controls designed specifically for multi-platform, responsive applications 

  32. Syncfusion wrote a free book on it – Uno Platform Succinctly 

  33. Balance your WebAssembly app size and performance using Interpreter, AOT or a mix of both 

  34. We are super easy to reach and fast to answer at GitHub Discussions or on Discord 

  35. Works with Visual Studio 2017 / 2019 / 2022, Rider, VS Code. If you insist on developing on Mac, it works on Visual Studio for Mac too, but in our opinion, you lose a lot of the dev loop benefits by not being on a Windows box 

  36. Two Microsoft MVPs – Matt Lacey and Marcel Wegner wrote a book on it – Creating Cross-platform C# Applications with Uno Platform 

  37. It gives back to the community – not only the code but it supports other OSS projects, user groups and conferences and sponsors community coding competitions. 

  38. Our Figma Material Toolkit comes with fully blown eCommerce App 

  39. Reuse your favorite MVVM pattern on all platforms  

  40. XAML for UI is a mature & well documented technology – you’ll always find an example suiting your needs  

  41. Start designing and developing your app before knowing which platform you’ll need to target  

  42. You can put an image in a button, in a button  

  43. Uno Platform provides SkiaSharp support for WebAssembly  

  44. Do 95% of the work without using iOS or Android at all. Yes, even to test.   

  45. Do most of your mobile dev work without even needing an emulator (=> productivity), without needing to touch a provisioning profile and without needing a MacBook 

  46. You can contribute to Uno with full confidence that you’re backed by our test suite 

  47. No more passing around Android Context in every method just to be able to actually do something  

  48. You can run SQLite, Entity Framework Core in the browser. Promise.  

  49. It has XAML Hot Reload on all platforms! 

  50. Unified UI testing using Xamarin.UITest and Selenium  

After a list like this, the only thing left to do is to give Uno Platform a try via this 5-min tutorial 

For all of you wondering, here is what the 2019 list looked like 

About Uno Platform

For those new to Uno Platform – it allows for creation of pixel-perfect, single-source C# and XAML apps which run natively on Windows, iOS, Android, macOS, Linux and Web via WebAssembly. It offers Figma integration for design-development handoff, and a set of extensions to bootstrap your projects. Uno Platform is free and Open Source (Apache 2.0) and available on GitHub.

Next Steps

To upgrade to the latest release of Uno Platform, please update your packages to 4.4 via your Visual Studio NuGet package manager! If you are new to Uno Platform, the best way to get started is to follow our official getting started guide. (5 min to complete)

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