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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-06-17T12:30:06+00:00

I’ve been searching solutions for my enterprise apps, at least 3 platforms need to

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I’ve been searching solutions for my enterprise apps, at least 3 platforms need to be supported, which are iOS, Android and Window Phone. After a whole day’s search, I finally set my eyes on 2 promising cross platform solutions, one is monocross and the other phonegap.
monocross seems to use c# and .net at all, is it possible to access native libraries and languages? I read somewhere it’s compiled directly into binaries that can execute on target platforms.
And about phonegap, it uses webviews on each platform to provide the capabilities of presenting user interfaces to final users. As it’s implemented via interpreted language and high level apis, the performance may not meet our needs.
Finally, we(my team) decide to give it a try with mono, the architecture is illustrated as bellow:

+++++++++++++++++++++representation layer++++++++++++++++++++++++++
[monotouch,monodroid,silverlight]or [native gui calls] or [html5/js/css]

+++++++++++++representation controller/business logic layer+++++++++++++++
[ mono/c# ]

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++server side+++++++++++++++++++++++++++
[ the cloud ]

I want to use mono/c# to write some common purpose business logic and data structures, and when it comes to some common platform features, like storage service, notifications, I’d like to wrap them up on each platform and expose uniform apis for c#(business logic layer) to use. As to the representation layer, we decide to choose from the 3 optional solutions listed above.

To make this happening, first I have to figure out if it is possible to call native frameworks.
So, my questions are:
1, How does mono work, I mean, are the c# codes compiled into binaries that can be executed directly on iOS, Android and Windows Phone?
2, Is there a mechanism to make native invocations? Like in cocos2d-x, I can call java methods via JNI, and in iOS, c++ can call oc directly. Can I call cocoa touch stuffs in mono with c#?
3, Is it possible to manage all these stuffs in one single project, and how to build them?
4, Are there any better solutions?

Any suggestions will be appreciated, thanks for your patience!

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    I wonder why Xamarin does not land on the first page of your search result,

    http://xamarin.com/features

    But that’s what the Mono guys created for the C# developers that want to target mobile platforms. MonoTouch and Mono for Android are there each featuring a common library base with Microsoft .NET, and also platform specific bindings.

    Your non-UI code should be able to be used in portable libraries and share among them. Microsoft’s portable library is Windows specific, and right now I am not sure how much Mono guys can embrace that, but even if PCL fails, you can create multiple platform specific projects based on the same copy of source files (which I did in #SNMP). The remaining task is to develop platform specific UI for Windows Phone, iOS, and Android.

    There are tons of articles showing the features,

    http://docs.xamarin.com/

    and also many successful apps

    http://xamarin.com/apps

    The best way to learn a product is to try it out (for free in Xamarin’s case). This also applies to MonoCross (which is a framework built upon Mono).

    I am not familiar with PhoneGap, so you need someone’s advice on that.

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