Please forgive the harsh title, and apologies in advance if anything below seems inflammatory. I mean it in all good faith, and for the betterment of XF.
My team started working on a new App this week for Android and iOS. We use Xamarin.Forms throughout for faster development and more uniform user experience. As always, I personally love Xamarin, and the experience has been great so far.
That said, we have run into what is basically a complete show-stopper: Xamarin.Forms.Maps.
I honestly do not understand what this package is doing in the stable release - it is not simply buggy; it does not even work. On Android, All the main features are broken:
- It is not possible to zoom or scroll without hacks - the map will immediately snap back to its original location and zoom level (note: this is fixed in the pre-release version of 1.3)
- Pins flicker seemingly randomly after being placed, no matter how many or few of them there are. The flicker undos any interaction with the pin (such as bringing up the name assigned to it).
Furthermore, while it is an experimental feature since pre-rel 2, It is not possible to bind click event listeners to Pins, even though the event itself is exposed. Binding a listener to it does nothing at all.
Thus, even with pre-release software (which we do not intend to use in production), we are not getting half of the essential features of Maps. We have gotten to the point where we simply cannot move on with it - our only option is either platform-specific UI code or custom renderers if we want working maps. As the app is map-oriented, there is no way around it.
Xamarin, I hope you do not take this in a negative or critical way, but in the shape it is currently in, Maps has no place in the stable release. It is at best beta software, and unfortunately other programmers may start their projects as well expecting it to work, only to find themselves in this situation as well.
I Love Forms, but very much looking forward to see this fixed! All of this is on the Bugzilla and has been there for months already.
All the best, and thanks for all your hard work.