Both Mono for Android and MonoTouch bring the core of .NET to the iPhone and Android platforms, but neither offer a UI cross-platform solution.
Each operating system offers slightly different services for building user interfaces, interacting with the phone, the address book, the built-in GPS and audio systems.
Each operating system offers slightly different services for building user interfaces, interacting with the phone, the address book, the built-in GPS and audio systems.
Our recommendation for users that want to target all three mobile platforms is for developers to separate the business logic of their application from the user interface and hardware interface layer. This means that both the user interface layer and any hardware integration components will have to be written once for each platform.
Your business logic can consist of anything that uses the core APIs in:
- mscorlib.dll
- System.dll
- System.Core.dll
- System.Json.dll
- System.Runtime.Serialization.dll
- System.ServiceModel.dll
- System.ServiceModel.Web.dll
- System.Web.Services.dll
- System.Xml.dll
- System.Xml.Linq.dll
- Mono.Security.dll
- Mono.Data.Sqlite.dll
- Mono.Data.Tds.dll
- monotouch.dll
- OpenTK.dll
In addition, OpenGL code between the iPhone and Android can be shared, as we support the OpenTK API, an object-oriented wrapper for C# developers to access OpenGL libraries.
Since the core Mono for Android and MonoTouch libraries are supersets of the Silverlight APIs, you might have to factor those features out to port to Silverlight or Windows Phone.