At the end of January, 2022 we will remove Xamarin from our officially supported platforms and with that, we’ll also remove all VS4 Mac stacks. Preceding that - at the end of October, 2021 - Xamarin Steps and Visual Studio stacks will be deprecated on Bitrise and moving forward we will not publish new updates for them (with exceptions).
Xamarin was the first cross-platform framework Bitrise supported, as one of the leading enablers of cross-platform mobile development back in 2016.
Today, though, Xamarin usage on Bitrise has not kept pace with emerging cross-platform frameworks like Flutter and React Native. At the same time, supporting Xamarin comes with a unique set of challenges that we don’t experience in the other technology we support.
Ensuring the level of experience developers need and expect from Bitrise means we’ve had to make the difficult choice to focus our efforts on those technologies that have similar infrastructure and support requirements. There, we feel we can further elevate our level of support, impacting more developers, more apps, and more end-users.
Unfortunately, this means we have come to the decision to stop Xamarin early next year. We understand that for those developing in Xamarin on Bitrise today, that has consequences. Rest assured that we’ll do whatever is in our power to make this transition as easy as possible for our users, and please don’t hesitate to reach out if you have further questions.
Changes going live at the end of October
- New Xamarin apps will not be supported: The Xamarin scanner will be removed from Bitrise and the project scanner will not recognize Xamarin apps and will not create default Workflows.
- Xamarin steps will be deprecated: The Steps will still be available and the builds will not break, but the Workflow editor will not list these Steps anymore.
- Visual Studio for Mac stacks will be deprecated and will not receive additional updates.
Changes going live at the end of January, 2022
- Xamarin Steps will be removed from the Step Library: The Steps will not be available in the Workflow editor anymore, however, the repository of the Steps will not be deleted.
- Visual Studio for Mac stacks will be removed from Bitrise.
Special notice for Visual Studio stack users
Due to the Xamarin-specific requirements, the Java version on the Visual Studio stack will remain Java 8 by default.
If you are using the Visual Studio for Mac stack for platforms other than Xamarin, we suggest migrating your Workflows to macOS stacks.
.jpg)
