As we dive into 2026, many developers are wondering about the current state of MAUI (Multi-platform App UI) and its performance. As someone who works with MvvmCross but is considering building a simple MAUI app without complex media or UI-heavy tasks, I'm curious to know if Rider's support for MAUI is any good.
In reality, migrating our app from Xamarin to MAUI on .NET 8 and now .NET 9 has been a big pain initially. However, things have gotten smoother, comparable to the experience with Xamarin. While there are still smaller quirks to work around, this was already the case in Xamarin. The biggest pain, however, is Android's terrible performance.
Regarding Rider, it works quite fine now, but I do encounter some issues where builds will randomly fail and debugging/hot reloading won't work, requiring me to clean the project and delete .idea files – a real pain sometimes. MAUI does its job for the most part, but it's not great, and I wouldn't recommend it due to quirks, performance issues, and instabilities.
Tooling Issues
My main issue nowadays is with tooling. Using either Rider or Visual Studio for Windows is an awful experience, with classic clean-and-delete-bin-objs, font rendering, hot reload stopping to work – you name it. On the positive side, my experience so far has been good regarding the framework itself.
Performance and Debugging
One thing people often forget is that debug mode in MAUI is WAY slower than Xamarin (about 4/5 times slower). However, when you switch to a release version, the app seems like another one. There's still a long road ahead with many critical bugs (or simple ones) to be fixed, but things are moving forward at least.
Optimizing Code and XAML
Optimizing code and XAML can significantly improve performance for all platforms. With this approach, a big group of apps might turn from slow to okay performance-wise. You can even download nugets for that PR to check it out now.
Future Development
In 2026, we should continue accelerating the resolution of bugs and optimizing logic at the same time. By using AI analysis to improve code, the problem of MAUI being slow may be improved.
Updates and Feedback
Just as an update, I've published my client's latest app yesterday on both Android and iOS. As for feedback, I think in 2026 we should continue to accelerate the resolution of bugs and optimize logic at the same time.
Xamarin vs. MAUI
In 2026, we still use Xamarin.Forms, Xamarin.Android, and Xamarin.iOS. Why? Because migrating to MAUI is painful, with lots of custom handlers and components that need enhancement. MAUI is good for .NET developers to craft some mobile apps, but if you want to migrate, consider rewriting all your sources to another cross-platform framework like RN or Flutter.
Compiling Xamarin Apps
As we approach the deadline for iOS 18 (required from April 2026) and Android 15 (required from August 2026), I'm curious about how you'll compile Xamarin apps. Will it be a smooth transition, or will there be more hurdles to overcome?
A Positive Experience
Actually, .NET MAUI isn't that bad! I'm finishing the development of a .NET MAUI 8 app for Android and iOS, and the framework has been pretty descent. It's not a huge app, but it includes many features like user management through an API, barcode scanning, search-enabled dynamic CollectionViews, and even forms dynamically created in code – all implemented nicely in a MVVM fashion.
Overall, my experience with .NET MAUI has been very good. I've heard lots of bad things about it, but decided to go for it and haven't been disappointed. Things do work, and the official documentation is good enough (compared to ChatGPT and StackOverflow that misled me most of the time).
Stabilization
I'd say things are a lot better now that things have had some time to stabilize after the .NET 9 release. Yeah, there are still some bugs, and performance could be improved a bit. Generally though, things are getting pretty smooth. For the most part, the apps are pretty snappy in terms of startup and runtime performance. The MAUI team is pretty responsive, I find.