How to decide between MonoTouch and Objective-C? [closed]

Answer 1

The cost of the MonoTouch library is entirely beside the point. The reason you shouldn't use Mono for your iPhone apps, is that it is a crutch. If you can't be bothered to learn the native tools, then I have no reason to believe that your product is worth downloading.

Edit: 4/14/2010 Applications written with MonoTouch aren't eligible for the iTunes Store. This is as it should be. Apple saw plenty of shallow ports on the Mac, using cross-platform toolkits like Qt, or Adobe's own partial re-implementation of the System 7 toolbox, and the long and short of it is they're just not good enough.

Answer 2

So, my answer to a previous similar question is to learn Objective-C. (Also, don't forget about debugging support)

This will probably offend some but to be honest, if you are going to do any serious development, you should learn Objective-C. Not knowing Objective-C in iPhone development will just be a hindrance. You won't be able to understand many examples; you have to deal with the quirks of Mono whereas if you had a working knowledge of Objective-C you could get a lot more out of the platform documentation.

Personally, I don't understand the position that says increasing the amount of information you need in favor of using Mono over the platform's native language. It seems somewhat counterproductive to me. I think if this is a very expensive proposition (learning a new language) then it may be worthwhile spending some time on fundamental programming concepts so that learning new languages is a fairly cheap proposition.

Another user also wrote this:

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Monotouch is easier for you now. But harder later.

For example, what happens when new seeds come out you need to test against but break MonoTouch for some reason?

By sticking with Mono, any time you are looking up resources for frameworks you have to translate mentally into how you are going to use them with Mono. Your app binaries will be larger, your development time not that much faster after a few months into Objective-C, and other app developers will have that much more of an advantage over you because they are using the native platform.

Another consideration is that you are looking to use C# because you are more familiar with the language than Objective-C. But the vast majority of the learning curve for the iPhone is not Objective-C, it is the frameworks - which you will have to call into with C# as well.

For any platform, you should use the platform that directly expresses the design philosophy of that platform - on the iPhone, that is Objective-C. Think about this from the reverse angle, if a Linux developer used to programming in GTK wanted to write Windows apps would you seriously recommend that they not use C# and stick to GTK because it was "easier" for them to do so?

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Answer 3

Using Mono is not a crutch. There are many things that it adds to the iPhone OS. LINQ, WCF, sharable code between a Silverlight app, an ASP.NET page, a WPF app, a Windows Form app, and there's also mono for Android and it will work for Windows Mobile as well.

So, you can spend a bunch of time writing Objective-C (You'll see from many studies where the exact same sample code in C# is significantly less to write than OC) and then DUPLICATE it all for other platforms. For me, I chose MonoTouch because the Cloud App I'm writing will have many interfaces, the iPhone being only one of them. Having WCF data streaming from the cloud to MonoTouch app is insanely simple. I have core libraries that are shared among the various platforms and then only need to write a simple presentation layer for the iPhone/WinMobile/Android/SilverLight/WPF/ASP.NET deployments. Recreating it all in Objective-C would be an enormous waste of time both for initial dev and maintenance as the product continues to move forward since all functionality would have to be replicated rather than reused.

The people who are insulting MonoTouch or insinuating that users of it need a crutch are lacking the Big Picture of what it means to have the .NET framework at your fingertips and maybe don't understand proper separation of logic from presentation done in a way that can be reused across platforms and devices.

Objective-C is interesting and very different from many common languages. I like a challenge and learning different approaches... but not when doing so impedes my progress or creates unnecessary re-coding. There are some really great things about the iPhone SDK framework, but all that greatness is fully supported with MonoTouch and cuts out all the manual memory management, reduces the amount of code required to perform the same tasks, allows me to reuse my assemblies, and keeps my options open to be able to move to other devices and platforms.

Answer 4

Three words: Linq to SQL

Yes it is well worth the $.

Answer 5

If this is the only iPhone app you will ever develop, and you also have zero interest in developing Mac applications, ever, then MonoTouch is probably worth the cost.

If you think you'll ever develop more iPhone apps, or will ever want to do some Mac native development, it's probably worth it to learn Objective-C and the associated frameworks. Plus, if you're the type of programmer that enjoys learning new things, it's a fun new paradigm to study.

Answer 6

Something I'd like to add, even though there's an accepted answer - who is to say that Apple won't just reject apps that have signs of being built with Mono Touch?