Bent from Fuse here: I wouldn't say so. Xamarin strikes us as something meant for people who want to code C# and work within the .NET ecosystem, while Fuse takes a completely different approach (to both how you develop your apps, and what you spend your time on while doing it). The choice of JS for business logic was also made to enable more people to find an easier path into app development. Our UX Markup (that compiles to native C++ code) is one thing that makes Fuse differ quite a lot from many other frameworks.
Bent from Fuse here — that's indeed our primary design goal. We believe designers shouldn't necessarily learn to code, and coders shouldn't be fluent in design, but getting each role to come close together and to give them a common language and similar semantics, as well as a platform that enables quick iterations, is important to us.
"Our (former) jobs as programmers at ARM gave us a front-row view of all the capabilities of modern mobile devices, and it became apparent that most developers underutilized a lot of these devices. As a consequence, much of the raw power didn't benefit the end users who bought these pocket-sized supercomputers. Secondly, the way apps are developed hasn't changed much in the last 20-30 years. New tools and computer languages have come and gone, but the process remains largely the same, with developers and designers operating in separate worlds, using a different set of tools.
This is partly because collaboration across these boundaries requires a huge amount of additional work just to translate and re-implement the vision of stakeholders and designers into production code. In turn, this resulted in unsustainable processes of slow iterations for testing and validating ideas. Consequently, you end up with products and user experiences that are less thought-through or polished, even though you've spent an unacceptable amount of time, resources and risk to produce them.
These two takeaways lead us to realize that what was needed wasn’t another micro-optimization tool. We had to take a step back and consider the entire development process from through the lens of product owners and designers, as well as developers. Fuse is the byproduct of that process."
I totally get that — thankfully Fuse itself is free (it has the same real-time desktop preview engine for both Windows and macOS, uses the same descriptive UX Markup language, and lets you deploy without cost to both iOS and Android like you're used to).
Fuse Studio is meant for people who want or need extra tooling on top, and is indeed our premium offering (the Fuse Professional plan doesn't just include Fuse Studio, but also premium components, Xcode and Android Studio library export support, multiple viewports and more). It's definitely not just for teams either, it's just _more suited_ if you work together with others.
There's a 30-day free trial of Fuse Studio too, so check it out and see if you'll do more than well enough with regular Fuse.
Bent from Fuse here again: thanks for the feedback — we definitely know of a lot of people who use both RN and Fuse for different projects. They both have advantages and disadvantages, depending on your team makeup, experience and what type of project you're working on.
Even if you are making mobile apps all year round, what if tomorrow you don't want to use Fuse anymore? You'd need to keep on paying the subscription to fix bugs.
What if you are a freelancer who only makes mobile apps from time to time? Again you need to pay the whole enchilada to be able to fix little bugs from time to time.
A price per published app would make more sense IMO. Allow devs to use the complete experience for developing, make them pay when they need to compile and publish the app. If you are confident that your users will love your dev experience (which seems your stronger selling point) this would not feel like a trap.
Bent from Fuse here — The UX Markup compiler is actually written in Uno, a lightweight C# dialect that compiles to native C++ for iOS and Android. JavaScript is just used for business logic and runs on a separate thread from the UI engine.
Yeah, that's pretty accurate, there's plenty difference between Fuse and hybrid app solutions / traditional cross-compilation stuff. The people behind Fuse come from GPU design and demoscene backgrounds too, which I would say is a good sign :)
Last week I actually went almost two whole days without internet access. It wasn't intentional (I forgot my iPhone at home when I left for two days), and where I went there was no computer or other internet accessible devices. I survived fine, but yeah.. a certain degree of separation angst.
