MAmattmanser·May 30, 2026
In Ask HN: What Is the State of App Development in 2026?dotnet
maui
C#2020–2026
dotnet / maui
maui
.NET MAUI is the .NET Multi-platform App UI, a framework for building native device applications spanning mobile, tablet, and desktop.
42Distinct people
50Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
23.3KGitHub stars
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What it is
.NET MAUI is the .NET Multi-platform App UI, a framework for building native device applications spanning mobile, tablet, and desktop.
GitHub
Where it is used
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This week on Hacker News
Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 3:56:07 PM UTC.
No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.
Mentions over time
HN mentions by year50 dated mentions
Observed mentions: 2020-05-19 15:28:10 UTC to 2026-05-30 16:45:53 UTC.
* An incomplete calendar period is marked with an outlined bar. Its count is not directly comparable with a full period.
Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.
View mention counts and date ranges
| Period | Start (UTC) | End (exclusive, UTC) | Mentions | Submissions | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2020 | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 8 | 5 | 3 |
| 2021 | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 15 | 2 | 13 |
| 2022 | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 11 | 2 | 9 |
| 2023 | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 9 | 2 | 7 |
| 2024 | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 1 | 0 |
| 2025 | 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 4 | 1 | 3 |
| 2026 (partial) | 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2027-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2 | 0 | 2 |
What Hacker News says
50 sourcesActual source (there are many others): https://github.com/dotnet/maui/discussions/29483
In MAUI Is Coming to LinuxI don't know if it has since improved, but .NET MAUI was really, really rough when I created a mobile app for my employer last year. I'm talking basic things - changing basic colors on the toolbar (1), putting non-text content inside a button (2), basic trigger behavior (3), to list a few. Not to mention that .NET UI has been years behind on hot-reload and developer tooling. Additionally, It was a fight to keep our app performant. The XAML compiler is a step in the right direction, but we had relatively simple views (in the dozens of components) absolutely tanking our FPS. I know there is probably some of my skill issue in there, but when I find basic things taking hours to optimize that I wouldn't even think about in React, I start to wonder about the framework. I spent a lot of time creating PRs on .NET MAUI but their team appears quite
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small and overloaded. I wish them the best - they're some talented folks, but I don't envy their job.
I can't help but think of Joel Spolsky's Things You Should Never Do (5) - the transition from Xamarin to .NET MAUI feels like a very similar mistake to Netscape. All of the battle tested Xamarin code, documentation, community examples, packages, etc. is now dead and has to be converted over to .NET MAUI.
On top of that, XAML just doesn't do it for me - having to deal with code-behind, MVVM view models, custom converters, and the actual XAML files themselves is insane for what is usually just a a single file in JS. The fact that you need to write a "InvertedBoolConverter" (4) just to flip a boolean is the most Microsoft thing ever. MAUI feels like it's designed just to keep a large development team busy. I'm not joking, we have a 42 line file that's only purpose is to flip booleans for XAML views.
We're a C# shop so it was nice to share our common C# with our desktop application, but I don't think it was worth it in the end. Sure JS has its problems, but I'll take those problems any day over MAUI.
I hope Avalonia can fix .NET MAUI - it'd be a massive kudos to them if they can smooth it over, but I can't say I'd willingly rely on this project long term.
1 - https://github.com/dotnet/maui/pull/15612
2 - https://github.com/dotnet/maui/issues/8191
3 - https://github.com/dotnet/maui/pull/15655
4 - https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/communitytoolkit/ma...
5 - https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-...
https://github.com/dotnet/maui/pull/16965
Not to be confused with the MauiKit[0], the cross platform UI toolkit that had the name first[1]
[0] https://mauikit.org/
[1] https://github.com/dotnet/maui/issues/35
In .NET MAUI is coming to Linux and the browserI don't think "was always" is an accurate statement
However, above and beyond free, it is also a collection of ECMA standards https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/fundamentals/standa...
Now, don't get me wrong: I have grave suspicions there is currently only one actual implementation of them (I don't count hobby, or abandonware, ones) but IMHO "actual standard" combined with "for real reference implementation" is way better than just reference implementation
---
since I'm still within the edit window, the MAUI referenced by the sibling comment is MIT licensed https://github.com/dotnet/maui
https://github.com/dotnet/blazor (Apache 2) is marked an archived, and points to https://github.com/dotnet/aspnetcore (MIT) but command-f blazor on its readme is nothing so :shrug:
In Java 25 officially releasedMaui multi-platform App UI framework for mobile and desktop
3 points · Open discussionfew months ago I tried to wrap up a MAUI PoC app from a more junior coworker, who failed to deliver anything working after weeks of trying.
Then I spent two weeks on trivial shit and stuff you expect to work by default (pull to refresh, video streaming, video in list view etc.)
After two weeks of stress, failure and dozen of known issues on GitHub with tons of frustrated developers [1], I rewrote the whole poc in flutter in 3 days.
Keep in mind this was a simple app with two screens and sign in/sign up - the only thing mildly technicall was a list view with videos (video feed).
Literally nothing in MAUI worked as advertised and their showoff apps are ridiculous. The build process takes forever and breaks randomly, iteration is slow and debugging breaks all the time.
This is the exact same experience I've had with Xamarin 5-6 years ago.
An
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y imaginary gain you think you'll have by being able to share code between client and server will be offset many times by having a sane/working dev environment like flutter (working framework, fast iteration) and the language isn't that far off from c#.
[1] https://github.com/dotnet/maui/issues/8926#issuecomment-1563...
Developers are not happy with .NET MAUI, but nobody in the team cares about it
151 points · Open discussionI was browsing the dotnet/maui repo and the vibes over there are not great.
decided to give the framework a quick spin myself and for god sake, this thing is in terrible shape. I built a quick holy grail layout with basic content and it looks completely different on all platforms. basic controls are not working and collections are laggy.
seems that nobody in the team really uses this thing in production or interacts with the community
more of the same
https://github.com/dotnet/maui/discussions/17917
https://github.com/dotnet/maui/discussions/15203
In Developers are not happy with .NET MAUI, but nobody in the team cares about itMaui is Open Source, MIT License
https://github.com/dotnet/maui
.NET is Open Source
https://dotnet.microsoft.com/en-us/platform/open-source
I do share your skepticism of Microsoft, but it looks like the economics and cash flow dynamics have changed drastically after the advent of the cloud.
Microsoft is more focused on getting developers onto its ecosystem and help them with open source projects with the hope that they will use its Azure cloud services and bring in the money.
My skepticism is a bit relaxed now and I have no qualms using .NET.
I hope I am not wrong.
In .NET 8 – MAUIIt's a bit of a hit and miss as of today. CLI, back-end and natively compiled libraries (think dll/so/dylib or even .lib/.a - you can statically link NAOT binaries into other "unmanaged" code) work best, GUI - requires more work.
Avalonia[0] and MAUI[1] have known working templates with it, but YMMV.
[0] https://github.com/lixinyang123/AvaloniaAOT / https://github.com/AvaloniaUI/Avalonia/
[1] https://github.com/dotnet/maui (try out with just <PublishAot>true</PublishAot> in csproj - it is known to work e.g. on iOS)
In .NET 8While this is the quite endorsed by the community: https://github.com/dotnet/maui/discussions/339
I think the fundamental issue is that desktop Linux is way too fragmented. Not only just GTK2/3 and Qt but you have GNOME, KDE, XFCE, Cinnamon and then you have X11, Xorg, Wayland...
To be honest, all those craps are why desktop Linux never took off. I'm very safe to say MAUI for Linux will eventually renders components off its own using framebuffer and hardware acceleration APIs such as OpenGL or Vulkan just because of the market fragmentations...
If desktop Linux truly wants to get the attention, it will need to unify. Fixing dependency hell using Flatpak is the right direction.
There is an existing old fork of MAUI for Linux that uses GTK: https://github.com/jsuarezruiz/maui-linux
In What's New in Final RC for .NET 8, .NET MAUI, Asp.net Core and EF8MSFTbot: “We've moved this issue to the Backlog milestone”
3 points · Open discussionMicrosoft has done this before with mauikit and mauilinux: https://github.com/dotnet/maui/issues/35
Unlikely that they even consider checking whether they are stomping across existing names.
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