Hey, you need to read the parent a bit closer.

Nobody's saying that Xamarin uses web views, but clearly there's a comparison to be drawn with the craze a few years back for writing mobile apps using web views. This was advocated as being cross-platform, allowing developers to write the same code and run it on multiple platforms. The downsides are the same in some ways, as the parent enumerated.

Xamarin's use of native UI is important, but in my experience it's clearly not as seamless as you think; while you access the UI natively, there are intrinsic architectural differences that make it difficult to do so in a high-performance manner without a lot of fairly hacky code.

Yes, I've read the parent closely. The downsides are still wrong, because they assume that Xamarin is a cross-platform UI toolkit, which is not true. The performance downside is wrong, the newer features downsides is wrong, the front-end code sharing is wrong, the third party libraries is wrong (Xamarin can generate bindings for other frameworks automatically), and the only debatable one is getting locked in a framework.

I haven't used Xamarin, but I've used a number of other frameworks (some webview based, many not). Some had benefits, but many had a lot of drawbacks.

I could write a long blog post about what a headache it is to support both platforms, but I don't think any of these frameworks solve the real pain points. It's generally a lot of small things which add up. It also takes a lot of team discipline.

Code sharing would be useful, but not massively since the majority of code is in the UI. When the UI is different, a lot of differences start to be needed in the non-UI code as well. Suddenly you are back at square one. Depends on the app though.