Developing iOS, Android, or Windows apps using the Xamarin.Forms approach is very different from developing apps using the native approach. Let's take a look at the benefits of developing apps using the Xamarin.Forms approach.

The Xamarin.Forms approach allows you to build your user interfaces, which can then be shared across each of the different mobile development platforms using 100% percent shared C# or F# code.

Using the Xamarin.Forms approach means that your applications will have access to over 40 user interface controls and layouts, which are then mapped to each of the native controls specific to the platform at runtime:

As you can see from the preceding screenshot, each platform for the Xamarin.iOS, Xamarin.Android, and Windows platforms shares common user interface code, which will be rendered differently on each platform, as well as a common Shared C# Backend containing the business logic that can be shared across all platforms.

Now that you have a good understanding of developing Xamarin apps using the native approach versus developing apps using the Xamarin.Forms approach, we can start to build our first app, which we will be covering in the next section.