The iPhone had only been on the market for two years and the App Store had only been around for about a year when Novell launched the first complete alternative for developing iPhone apps with XCode and Objective-C: MonoTouch. - Shortly before the Mono project was spun off into the Xamarin company of the same name in 2011, Novell released Mono for Android. After the spinoff, these two projects became Xamarin.Android and Xamarin.iOS and were combined under the name Xamarin platform.

This was followed in 2014 by the modern cross-platform solution Xamarin.Forms, which is built on top of the Xamarin platform and could be developed with just a single code base for both platforms, iOS and Android.

In 2016, Xamarin was acquired by Microsoft and both Mono and the Xamarin products were incorporated into the .NET product family. In 2021, after 8 years, the successor of Xamarin.Forms called .NET MAUI was released, which is now fully part of the .NET development cycle.

Xamarin products will only be supported by Microsoft until May 1, 2024.