Microsoft is making another move to expand its software and service to more platforms. The company has revealed it plans to acquire Xamarin, San Francisco-based company that creates software tools for making apps for iOS, Android and Windows platforms that can share common code.
Scott Guthrie of Microsoft stated:
" We have had a longstanding partnership with Xamarin, and have jointly built Xamarin integration into Visual Studio, Microsoft Azure, Office 365 and the Enterprise Mobility Suite to provide developers with an end-to-end workflow for native, secure apps across platforms. We have also worked closely together to offer the training, tools, services and workflows developers need to succeed.""With today's acquisition announcement we will be taking this work much further to make our world class developer tools and services even better with deeper integration and seamless mobile app dev experiences. The combination of Xamarin, Visual Studio, Visual Studio Team Services, and Azure provides a complete mobile app dev solution that provides everything you need to develop, test, deliver and instrument mobile apps for every device. We are really excited to see what developers build with it."
Xamarin was founded in 2011 and since then over 1.3 million unique developers have used its tools to make mobile apps with C#. Microsoft did not disclose the specific financial details of their Xamarin acquisition.
This acquisition may be related to our article yesterday detailing how Microsoft may use virtualization to bring universal Windows apps to competing platforms.
Update: Xamarin co-founder Nat Friedman has now issued a statement on the acquisition, thanking the company's customers and looking forward to the company's work with Microsoft.
To all Xamarins, thank you for the hard work and dedication that got us to this point. To our customers, thank you for your trust and faith in us. We wouldn't be here today without you and we'll continue to serve you at every step in your mobile journey.This acquisition is a new beginning for Xamarin—the company and its products—and is an opportunity to help many, many more developers build great apps. Like many of you, I see Microsoft and Xamarin as a perfect fit. Microsoft's mobile-first, cloud-first strategy is a great match for the Xamarin products and team.
Source: Microsoft
