Will .Net Maui suffer the same fate as Silverlight?

[lommez]

With 3.8 thousand open issues on github and some of them being years old, and with the arrival of .Net 10, everything indicates that .Net Maui will have the same fate as Silverlight. Not even Microsoft uses .Net Maui. That's where the question comes in: should we use and invest our efforts, time and money in a technology that not even Microsoft uses?

[davidortinau]

@lommez looking at the data the issues are down year over year, PRs are up significantly, and overall platform usage is growing a very healthy rate. Check our Build presentation from this year for more details about the momentum of the product.

Several Microsoft apps use .NET MAUI even though our primary audience is .NET customers. We've added several customer stories to the showcase recently, and more are coming as we continue to hear more and more success stories. .NET 10 is shaping up to be a fantastic release for .NET MAUI customers.

The comparison to Silverlight is a common one, and it really doesn't apply. Different time, product, market, use, etc. etc.

[rokmeglic71]

@davidortinau years ago we went from Silverlight to jQuery/html. Why Silverlight went down and why is it different to MAUI?

[Vroomer]

Why can't people just learn why Silverlight had to be abandoned instead of making nonsensical assumptions based on it. :/ Also - issue count? Really? Flutter's demise is imminent in that case. :D

[molesmoke]

When I first started with MAUI, I will freely admit, I found it to be quite flaky and I had some concerns about delivering a viable product with it. More recently though, things have improved a lot: Build times are shorter, runtime performance is faster, the tooling is more mature/stable, there are more/better third-party libraries, and I encounter fewer bugs. These days, I'm happy to say, my MAUI apps are running pretty smoothly and reliably, and the development is enjoyable rather than frustrating.

I'd be more likely to attribute the high number of issues an active user base rather than an indication of quality (dotnet runtime has 5K+ issues for instance). While I've reported a fair number of issues over the past few years, I find the MAUI team to be quite responsive, and most of the problems I've encountered/reported have been dealt with.

Problems remain of course, but things are much much better than they were at launch. I'm looking forward to more fixes/improvements with dotnet 10 (and esp. progress with Swift interop!)