.NET MAUI Overview for Technology Executives

MAUI is Microsoft’s next step after Xamarin.Forms: one C# codebase, XAML UI, and a single project layout that targets Android, iOS, macOS, and Windows with native speed. MAUI’s draw is quicker releases, more productive developers, and heavy code reuse. With cross-platform development growing annually, .NET MAUI represents a timely opportunity for technology leaders to drive innovation and ROI in their application portfolios.

A custom software development firm Belitsoft creates enterprise applications that are built to scale and adjust alongside evolving business needs. With .NET MAUI, your system will ensure a consistent user experience across Android, Windows, iOS, and macOS, retaining the native interface while minimizing efforts and redundancy in code.

.NET MAUI Architecture and Core Features

.NET MAUI unifies Android, iOS, macOS and Windows behind one API by wrapping each platform’s native stack (.NET for Android, iOS, Mac Catalyst and WinUI 3) and sharing the .NET Base Class Library. Apps run on Mono for mobile and Mac, CLR for Windows, and compile into native packages – JIT on Android, full AOT on iOS, Mac Catalyst on macOS, WinUI 3 on Windows.

Developers mostly call MAUI’s control layer, which passes straight through to native APIs, yet they can still hit those APIs directly when they need low-level features. New, rewritten controls promise speed and flexibility but may bring early bugs and a learning curve that can dent productivity.

A single-project structure replaces Xamarin.Forms’ multi-project setup, easing management but still requiring platform folders and platform know-how, so the “one skill-set” pitch is only partly true.

UI is rendered natively for proper look-and-feel and performance. .NET and XAML Hot Reload show code changes instantly, shortening build-debug loops. MAUI ships a large control set plus GraphicsView and Shapes for richer visuals.

Blazor Hybrid lets you drop web components into native apps, enabling code sharing and leveraging web-team skills, but it also enlarges build times, app size and maintenance complexity while introducing another UI paradigm. Each project should measure BlazorWebView performance before committing.

Finally, MAUI exposes cross-platform APIs for hardware features (camera, GPS, sensors) and still lets you dive down to platform-specific APIs whenever the abstraction isn’t enough.

Current State of.NET MAUI: Maturity, Stability, Performance, and Ecosystem

As of early 2025, .NET MAUI is still working through its growing pains. Developer chatter from late 2024 into 2025 points to stubborn bugs and uneven tooling – JetBrains Rider and Visual Studio for Mac draw the loudest complaints, and even Visual Studio 2022 shows rough edges. Performance remains the chief worry: Android, especially in debug builds, is where sluggishness is most obvious, with CarouselView called out as a repeat offender. Although MAUI’s architecture is designed for native-level speed, real-world users still report latency, and many developers judge the framework less mature than Xamarin.Forms ever was.

The resulting “maturity gap” inflates development costs, stretches schedules, erodes productivity, and elevates risk. When bugs slip into production they bruise brands and revenues, and slow Android apps in particular can torpedo an enterprise’s cross-platform strategy through poor UX, high abandonment, and negative reviews.

Microsoft is working to close that gap. Early .NET 9 previews already lift CollectionView performance and experiment with aggressive code trimming, NativeAOT compilation, and compiled XAML/bindings to shrink binaries and speed start-up and runtime. MAUI 8 is supported until May 2025 and MAUI 9 until May 2026, giving enterprises a near-term safety net while they watch whether the promised fixes land.

Around the framework the ecosystem is advancing but still thin: Visual Studio 2022 with Hot Reload anchors day-to-day workflow, the .NET MAUI Community Toolkit supplies reusable helpers, and Syncfusion leads the control market with public roadmaps. Yet the third-party library scene remains smaller than that of React Native or Flutter, compatibility gaps with Xamarin or wider .NET packages can stall migrations, documentation quality is inconsistent, and the community is still modest in size.

MAUI does benefit from the broader .NET ecosystem, but heavy dependence on Microsoft’s release cadence and on vendors that may lag in support leaves few quick work-arounds when framework bugs block progress – keeping the platform’s overall risk profile elevated until its tooling, libraries, and performance fully mature.

.NET MAUI vs. Xamarin vs React Native vs. Flutter

.NET MAUI is the direct successor to Xamarin.Forms, created to modernise the developer experience and shed long-standing limitations. Built on .NET 6 and now moving through .NET 9 previews, it folds every platform into a single project, removes the old renderer layer in favour of lighter-weight handlers, and promotes Windows (via WinUI 3) and macOS (via Mac Catalyst).

Xamarin.Forms reached end-of-support on 1 May 2024 – companies must migrate to MAUI for fixes and updates.

MAUI’s C#/XAML stack offers tight integration with the wider .NET ecosystem, promises native-component rendering and better runtime performance, but it still pays a .NET startup cost that can leave apps – especially large ones – slower to launch than their Xamarin or native counterparts.

Against today’s rivals, MAUI trades ecosystem breadth for skill leverage.

React Native (JavaScript/TypeScript) also renders native controls but routes calls through a JS bridge: it often starts faster than MAUI, enjoys a vast npm package pool and a larger community, yet can suffer runtime overhead from that bridge and offers only community-driven desktop options.

Flutter (Dart) draws every pixel with Skia, yielding uniform visuals, slick animations and fast startup on mobile and desktop alike, but it's custom look diverges from each OS’s native style and its app bundles can be hefty.

Both React Native and Flutter have deeper libraries and bigger communities than MAUI, reducing the need for custom workarounds.

MAUI’s slimmer catalogue and newer community can lengthen timelines for specialised features.

For .NET-centric teams, however, MAUI’s learning curve is far lower than switching to JavaScript/React or Dart/Flutter, and its direct C# interop exposes native APIs without extra glue code.

Choosing among them ultimately hinges on whether an organisation values existing .NET expertise and a fully native UI ethos (MAUI) more than a massive third-party ecosystem (React Native) or pixel-perfect cross-platform uniformity and top-tier animation performance (Flutter).

The decision is a classic cross-platform compromise: lower total cost than maintaining separate native teams but potential long-term friction around performance edge-cases, platform-specific features, and community support.

.NET MAUI Long-Term Strategy and Support Lifecycle

Microsoft now releases .NET MAUI in lock-step with the annual .NET cadence – MAUI 6 shipped with .NET 6 (unsupported since May 2023), MAUI 7 with .NET 7 (unsupported since May 2024), MAUI 8 with .NET 8 (serviced through 14 May 2025) and MAUI 9 with .NET 9 (serviced through 12 May 2026).

MAUI 10 is pencilled in for November 2025 alongside .NET 10. Each version gets regular Patch-Tuesday updates and a guaranteed six-month overlap with its successor, but enterprises must stay on the latest servicing build to retain Microsoft support, leaving earlier releases outside the safety net.

This pace reinforces Microsoft’s plan to make MAUI a core pillar of the unified .NET platform and the formal heir to Xamarin.Forms.

The framework’s open-source model, focus on developer experience, performance, and broader platform all appeal to .NET-centric teams, yet the brief support window forces rapid test-and-migration cycles that can inflate costs, stretch QA schedules, and raise risk.

Doubts about how extensively Microsoft “dog-foods” MAUI and whether the product receives resources on par with other flagship technologies further complicate executive buy-in, compelling organisations to budget for contingency plans, potential third-party support, and the lifecycle realities that now shape MAUI’s total cost of ownership.

Impact and Considerations for Enterprise Stakeholders

CIO & VP of Engineering: Architecting for the Future

For CIOs and VPs, .NET MAUI slots neatly into a modern, API-centric architecture because it is part of the wider .NET platform: teams can carry forward C# talent, existing class-library code, Visual Studio workflows and DevOps tooling, integrating cleanly with ASP.NET Core back-ends, Entity Framework data layers and Azure services.

It is also the sanctioned migration path for Xamarin.Forms, WPF and Windows Forms, turning those legacy desktop assets into cross-platform clients that reach iOS, Android, Windows (WinUI 3) and macOS (Mac Catalyst).

Enterprise packages such as SAP, Salesforce and Oracle are surfaced through the same REST, SOAP or gRPC endpoints used today – .NET’s mature HTTP libraries, native interop and Community Toolkit helpers cover the client side – so an explicit, API-led strategy keeps data silos in check, drives inevitable back-end modernization and reminds planners that a MAUI front end is only one slice of a broader system.

Budgets therefore must include API design, transformation logic, middleware, Mobile Device Management (Intune now points customers to MAUI), and the security controls – encrypted storage, HTTPS with certificate pinning, OAuth 2.0 or JWT, fine-grained authorisation, obfuscation, linker configuration and regular third-party-package audits – needed for HIPAA, GDPR or similar compliance across every target OS.

Scalability, performance, maintainability and release discipline hinge on the same fundamentals: MVVM plus Clean Architecture, modular features and DI for testability, AOT, NativeAOT, linker trimming, compiled bindings and shallow XAML hierarchies for speed, lazy-loading, smaller images and CollectionView for large datasets, and continuous profiling with dotnet-trace, gcdump or PerfView.

Yet MAUI’s own “growing pains” mean developers must learn framework-specific optimisation patterns while timing key gains to forthcoming .NET releases (.NET 9, etc).

Support lifecycles are fixed and short, OS-SDK updates can force disruptive upgrades, and community reports warn that decoupling those updates from MAUI versions is hard – so TCO calculations must include recurrent migration work.

Enterprise-class CI/CD adds further weight: GitHub Actions or Azure DevOps pipelines need both Windows and macOS agents, platform signing assets, secret stores, automated unit/integration/UI tests, security scans, staged roll-outs and monitoring, all of which exceed typical web-app complexity and demand specialised DevOps skills.

When governed well, a single MAUI codebase is cheaper to maintain than multiple native stacks and cushions teams against point bugs through loose coupling and disciplined practice. Unmanaged, it can amplify technical debt, rush releases and expose security gaps.

Successful adoption therefore requires strong technical leadership, constant up-skilling and an end-to-end plan that couples MAUI’s client benefits to robust back-end, operational and compliance foundations.

VP of Product Management & Chief Product Officer: Driving Product Success and Innovation

Product leaders will find .NET MAUI a double-edged proposition.

On the risk side, the framework still lags pure-native stacks in raw speed: slow start-ups, heavy controls such as CollectionView and CarouselView and recurring Android slow-downs can leak straight into poor UX, bad store reviews and lost engagement.

Because MAUI is young, platform-specific bugs and functional gaps crop up often, while a thinner third-party ecosystem and NuGet-compatibility snags – especially when porting Xamarin code or mixing .NET versions – can force expensive refactors or derail schedules.

This status also means deep, brand-new OS features arrive late, so a lowest-common-denominator model may curb disruptive innovation.

Teams must surface these threats early, weigh likelihood against impact, and counter them with modular architecture, disciplined MVVM, aggressive unit/integration/UX tests, continuous performance telemetry (App Center, etc.) and vigilant debt management. Otherwise the very bugs, performance quirks and rapid framework churn they hope to escape will erode stability, inflate costs and slow releases.

The upside is equally clear. A single C# / XAML codebase that targets Android, iOS, Windows and macOS can trim development effort by as much as 35 % and, with Hot Reload, lets UI teams iterate at web speed – NBC Sports Next cites “record-time” delivery.

BlazorWebView pushes reuse even further: hybrid projects report up to 95 % shared code, giving web-heavy organisations a low-risk bridge into native apps while preserving .NET back-end synergy, Azure connectivity and existing developer skill sets.

First-class desktop support widens the addressable market and reinforces Microsoft’s “.NET everywhere” vision. Consistent UX across form factors strengthens brand identity, and unified teams cut operating costs, provided the shipping app stays fast and bug-free. Success therefore hinges on recognising MAUI’s current limits, planning for rapid OS-SDK and framework updates, and keeping contingency budgets for native plug-ins or phased roll-outs. When leaders balance these realities – speed-to-market versus performance risk, broad reach versus delayed OS features – MAUI can be an engine for incremental innovation without becoming a liability to product viability.

Board of Directors & Executive Sponsors: Validating the Investment

Decision-makers judge .NET MAUI on total cost, return, strategic value, and how long Microsoft will keep it healthy.

A full TCO scan looks at six buckets:

1. acquisition (MAUI is open-source; VS Community free; Enterprises may pay for VS Pro/Enterprise);
2. development (C#/MAUI salaries, smaller when a .NET team is reused, bigger when bug-workarounds or native parity work creep in, so overall cost sits between one and three native teams);
3. infrastructure (build servers, a macOS agent for iOS, test devices, plus Azure or other cloud pipelines);
4. training (XAML, MVVM, handler model, platform quirks);
5. maintenance (one codebase is cheaper until frequent MAUI and OS updates claw savings back);
6. and hidden items such as framework instability, library migrations, performance tuning, or running MAUI alongside other stacks.

On the upside, “write once, run anywhere” trims labour, Hot Reload speeds UI work, and case studies - NBC Sports Next, FinLocker, Fidelity Active Trader Pro, Dynamics 365 Store Commerce, the Azure app, a retail inventory system, Alpha Outdoors’ 3-D rock-climbing tool – show wider reach and code reuse across iOS, Android, Windows, and macOS, often linked to Azure. MAUI also fuels quicker experiments, unifies tech under .NET, and helps keep or hire C# talent – benefits that can outweigh pure financial ROI.

Yet every gain leans on maturity and performance. Slow start-ups, Android hotspots like CollectionView and CarouselView, and library gaps can erase ROI, raise support tickets, and push schedules out. Migration from Xamarin is common, but any inherited debt must be tackled. Success stories mostly spotlight wins, not hidden clean-up cost, so each firm must match claims to its own scale and risk appetite.

Confidence comes from Microsoft’s ≥ 18-month (or +6 months overlap) support policy, MAUI’s annual release lockstep with .NET, open-source transparency, active – though smaller – community, and big-company or in-house Microsoft deployments. Confidence drains when bugs linger, performance stalls, or questions arise about Microsoft “dog-fooding”. More instability means more support calls and higher TCO, and relying on community fixes alone is risky.

Bottom line: MAUI can lower costs and speed delivery if its still-maturing framework and rapid update cadence fit your risk profile and your budget for training, extra debugging, and periodic upheavals. Strong due-diligence, early library checks, modular design, and realistic performance testing decide whether those promises translate into lasting value.

VP of Technical Talent: Cultivating Expertise and Managing Talent

A VP of Technical Talent has three jobs when evaluating .NET MAUI: grasp how steep the framework’s learning curve is, know what the talent market looks like, and build a plan for hiring or upskilling.

Existing C# and Xamarin.Forms developers start with a clear edge – object-oriented skills, .NET libraries and even much of the Xamarin mindset carry over – but they still need to absorb MAUI’s single-project layout, handler architecture, XAML UI, MVVM patterns, data binding, dependency injection and platform-specific tweaks.

Microsoft’s seven-hour Learn path or a typical 4-to-10-hour fundamentals course will get someone building screens, yet true proficiency comes only after wrestling with MAUI’s bugs, tooling quirks and performance pitfalls. That “unofficial curriculum” can add days or weeks to ramp-up.

Demand for MAUI skills is rising as enterprises modernise Xamarin apps and chase cross-platform reach, but the supply is still smaller than for React Native or Flutter and mostly composed of upskilled .NET developers.

U.S. salaries reflect a maturing niche – about $97K at the 25th percentile, $112K on average and $143K at the 90th – with Bay-Area hotspots like Fremont and Berkeley hitting the high end. Rates sit above general .NET roles yet below AI/ML or cloud-security positions, suggesting room for upward movement as adoption grows.

Given that market, the fastest route to staff a MAUI effort is to retrain your own .NET people, supplement with Xamarin veterans and recruit selectively for gaps in native-platform, performance-tuning or Blazor-hybrid know-how.

Screening should focus on cross-platform portfolios, understanding of iOS, Android, macOS and Windows nuances, and the ability to optimize and test across devices.

Remote hiring widens the pool and softens regional salary spikes, while flexible contracts – fixed-bid, dedicated or hourly – help manage risk. A formal program of workshops, peer sharing, and mentoring by senior MAUI engineers keeps the team current, and continuous professional development is essential as the framework – and its quirks – evolve.