Build Your Own Selfies App with Xamarin.Forms and Azure

Text messaging is so ‘90s! With the rise of selfies as today’s preferred form of communication, we decided to build a sample app that reflects this paradigm shift. Today, we’re happy to introduce Moments, a Snapchat clone built entirely with Xamarin.Forms and Azure. Moments is available for download today on Android, and is currently in review for iOS (stay tuned). Moments is also open-source and freely available under the MIT license, so building your own Snapchat clone based on Moments is easy! Follow the steps listed here, and you’ll be sending selfies in a matter of minutes.

Share More Code with Xamarin.Forms

Moments for iOS and Android was written entirely using Xamarin.Forms, allowing me to create native UIs from a single shared codebase while still maintaining access to all of the native APIs on each platform. Because Xamarin.Forms allows you to share nearly every line of code you write, a significant amount of code can be shared across the targeted platforms. Moments shared an amazing 88% of code on Android and 87% on iOS, resulting in a massive increase in developer productivity.

Moments is also a great sample for those interested in seeing everything Xamarin.Forms has to offer, including usage of custom renderers, the dependency service, data binding, styles, and much more.

Powerful Backends with Microsoft Azure

Great mobile apps require great backends. Azure provides everything you need to build that backend, including cloud storage, push notifications, social integrations, blob storage, and auto-scale to support millions of devices.

Moments uses Azure Mobile Services to store data in the cloud. Everything from accounts, to managing friendships between users, and even authentication is done using Azure Mobile Services in Moments. At Microsoft Build 2015, the Microsoft Azure team announced the Azure Storage preview for Xamarin. Azure Storage provides an easy way to store and retrieve large amounts of unstructured data, such as blobs, tables, queues, and SMB-based files. Moments takes advantage of the simple Azure Storage API to save all of your amazing selfies in the cloud (i.e. cloud selfie support).

Try Moments!

Moments is available for Android in the Google Play store today, and is in review for iOS in the Apple App Store. Be sure to send a “moment” to us at @XamarinHQ! Or, get started building your own ephemeral messaging app using Xamarin.Forms and Microsoft Azure by cloning Moments on GitHub.

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