Oracle and Xamarin flutter eyelashes at suits with native app deal

Oracle is tapping into the power of native apps and cloud delivery under a development deal with mobile app firm Xamarin.

The pair unveiled the Xamarin SDK for Oracle Mobile Cloud Service on Thursday, to build apps for iOS, Android and Windows.

Xamarin’s tools let you build native apps for the different mobile flavours using Microsoft’s C# language.

The deal gives Oracle access to a massive pool a million devs in the Xamarin community working in C# who are building enterprise and custom apps for different mobile platforms.

For Xamarin the technology collaboration opens the door on more than 100,000 Oracle enterprise customers.

Oracle, like all things cloud, is late to the party, with the Mobile Cloud announced at the company’s annual OpenWorld conference in late 2014.

An agreement with Xamarin potentially gives Oracle's mobile ambitions a potential fillip.

The secret is Xamarin’s ability to let devs write native apps for different vendors’ mobile devices using the tools and languages they might already know without having to go native for each platform.

Xamarin offers not only own development environment but also a plug-in to Microsoft’s Visual Studio, arguably the default business apps dev suite.

In a statement, Oracle vice president for mobility and development tools Chris Tonas said: “Millions of C# developers can now easily integrate mobile applications with enterprise systems by using Oracle Mobile Cloud Service.”

Xamarin comes from a Microsoft and open-source past: co-founder Nat Friedman co-created the GNOME foundation while colleague Miguel de Icaza directed the Mono Project, building an open-source implementation of Microsoft’s .NET. ®