Microsoft integrates Xamarin into Visual Studio for free, will open source Xamarin runtime
Microsoft today announced that Xamarin is now available for free for every Visual Studio user. This includes all editions of Visual Studio, including the free Visual Studio Community, Visual Studio Professional, and Visual Studio Enterprise.
Context & Ripple Effects
A month after paying a reported $400M-$500M for Xamarin, Microsoft is converting the acquisition into distribution: the multi-platform mobile toolkit ships inside every Visual Studio edition, including the free Community tier, and the Xamarin runtime will be opened up. The move follows the same playbook as the Code editor's open sourcing from late 2015.
The integration sets up the rest of the arc in the coverage: Xamarin Studio gets rebranded as Visual Studio for Mac, and a year later Xamarin Live Player lets developers run and debug iOS apps straight from Windows without a Mac.
First-order effects
- Every Visual Studio user — Community, Professional, and Enterprise — gets Xamarin's iOS and Android tooling at no cost, removing the subscription price that previously gated cross-platform C# development.
Second-order effects
- Xamarin's paid standalone licensing business disappears overnight, pushing its revenue model inside Microsoft's cloud and enterprise stack while undercutting rival cross-platform tool vendors on price.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds — buy a developer-tools company, then give the product away and open the runtime — mobile development consolidates around IDE ecosystems rather than per-seat tool licenses, with monetization shifting to adjacent services.
The trend: Microsoft is executing an open-and-free strategy across its developer tools, using acquisitions like Xamarin to widen Visual Studio's reach rather than to sell the acquired product directly.