Why I Don’t Use .NET MAUI Anymore

Tooling issues, bugs, and complexity made me realize that I get things done quicker with Flutter.

Photo by Tolu Akinyemi 🇳🇬 on Unsplash

I am not a beginner when it comes to cross-platform frameworks. Over the years I tried many of them. It all started with Delphi many years ago (yes, you can write cross-platform apps for desktop and mobile with it), then I went towards Xamarin/.NET MAUI, and finally settled with Flutter. I also did some small evaluation projects with Electron and Ionic. From all those options, I liked .NET MAUI and Flutter the most. But recently, I started focusing on Flutter and left .NET MAUI behind.

I want to talk about some of the issues that I encountered.

Language issues on Android phones

I worked with Visual Studio and deploying usually worked. But when the app launches with a debugger attached, I usually had an instant exception without a helpful message. The “solution” was to set the device language to US English. Then it worked. I cannot find anything on the internet anymore, but a SO thread led me to this solution.

Once I got used to it, it wasn’t a real deal breaker anymore. But finding that fix took a while. And it didn’t happen with the default app but only with mine.

Maybe there is an explanation for this and maybe it’s also fixed by now. I have already rewritten my app with Flutter and I am much happier now (not super happy because gradle might become my new arch enemy).

Lack of UI controls

Today this is probably not an issue anymore because a lot has happened in the past 2 years. Companies like DevExpress or Xceed published collections of controls and there is also SyncFusion and Telerik (paid). But in the beginning of .NET MAUI, there wasn’t a lot.

You had the built-in controls and maybe the community toolkit. And this wasn’t much. Building UIs was quite a challenge back then because you had to write a lot from scratch.

For my private projects I wanted things get done quickly. UI development took way longer than I wanted to just to get the essentials running. I was never really happy with the situation.