Building beautiful apps with Xamarin.Forms

James Montemagno

One question that I continuously get asked on Twitter is how can I make great looking apps with Xamarin.Forms? It is a great question, and anyone can build great looking apps with a little inspiration and a little styling. Now, I am not a designer, and I don’t claim to be a designer, but there is a lot of great inspiration out there for app designs including Dribbble, uplabs, and others. These designs from talented individuals around the globe can help to influence how your own apps look and feel.

Restaurant app by Oludayo Alli

Built-in awesome in Xamarin.Forms

There are several features in Xamarin.Forms that you can leverage to help bring these designs to life. Look no further than the new Shapes API to draw shapes, lines, polygons, and more. Want a consistent look and feel to your native controls? How about adding Material Design with a single line of code. Group your collections to perfection with CarouselView paired with IndicatorView and of course CollectionView.

Drink gallery app by Javier Suárez

Go further with custom community controls

The Xamarin Community Toolkit continues to add great controls including a DockLayout, Shield, TabView, and more. But there are even more awesome controls from the community including the fabulous Magic Gradients, PancakeView, MaterialFrame, CardView, Shadows, and so many more. Finally, we cannot forget SkiaSharp a general purpose 2D graphics system for .NET.

Shadows library showing phones with cards with shadow blur effects

Component ecosystem

Re-usable UI components from top component vendors like Telerik, UX Divers, GrapeCity, and Syncfusion help you get productive quickly. Be sure to check out the wide number of options when you’re ready to get started!

Island Tracker app for iOS and Android

Island Tracker using community & Syncfusion controls by me!

Get Inspired

Our very own Javier has been collecting amazing examples great looking open-source apps built with Xamarin.Forms for several years now that you can browse through on GitHub. I have already featured a few of these great looking apps, but here are a few more to get you inspired.

Credit card wallet app

CreditCard Wallet by Altevir

Airline flight app by Leomaris Reyes

Cook book app with crepes

Cook book app by Steven Thewissen

Cake app by Shaw Yu

There are so many more lovely designs to browse through! You can even add your own by simply opening a pull request on Javier’s GitHub repo.

Adobe XD Exporter

Many designs you find online or from your designer may be built with tools such as Adobe XD. You can easily import colors and styles into your Xamarin.Forms app thanks to the XD to Xamarin.Forms exporter from our very own Kym Phillpotts!

Go off and build beautiful apps

Tell us all about your apps by leaving comments below or submitting a pull request to Javier’s GitHub repo. Have terrific tips and tricks? Leave them below and share them with the world.

5 comments

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  • Ramseem A 0

    I heard about another technology, .NET MAUI will replace the Xamrin technology. And Xamrin is going to end on 2022. Now we got a project, they need cross platform technology. My question is “What technology we can able to suggest for this development?”

    Also only beta version of .NET MAUI is now available. They, our customer may not encourage the transition from one technology to another.

    Another question..
    UWP is dropped, and don’t know the future of WinUI. And Xamarin also going to die. How long Microsoft support the .NET MAUI?

  • Priyank Acharya 0

    nice article, very informative

  • Eleazar Saavedra 0

    Great article I did see a lot of people searching for a easy way to create good looking apps and now here we have a lot of inspiration.

  • Victor Lee 0

    The Adobe XD exporter seems like it’s been abandoned – it hasn’t been updated since 2019.

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