Essential Studio

Our project is to build a commercial-grade, security-compliant, serverless mobile app platform using only tools that are budget-friendly for startups. Our tool-chain selection includes AWS services (API Gateway, Cognito, Lambda, DynamoDB, ...), Microsoft .NET Core/Standard, Visual Studio and Xamarin. All these tools are essentially free until your app starts scaling. Syncfusion's community edition was chosen because it provides commercial-grade features and doesn't burden the entrepreneur with out-of-pocket expenses until their app is generating revenue. Finally, our experience with Syncfusion's support has been first rate.

Syncfusion targets many different UI presentation layers. In our case, we use Xamarin Forms which is relatively new for Syncfusion. The controls are generally solid but do require more "code-behind" work than is generally recommended in the Xamarin community. There are shops that totally refuse to allow "any" code-behind and if you are one of those you may have some issues using all of the Syncfusion controls. In our case, the limited code-behind required is not considered a barrier. In addition, the Syncfusion documentation is obviously not written by a native English speaker and as such can be amusing at times and occasionally annoying .