App tools company Xamarin revamped its tools, which it said enable 230,000 developers to build fully native apps across all major platforms.

The new release introduces Xamarin Studio, an integrated development environment (IDE), and the Xamarin Component Store.

It also delivers the “game-changing” ability for developers to build iOS apps in Visual Studio — “bridging one of the largest developer bases in the world to the most successful mobile device platform”.

Xamarin Studio is said to offer “streamlined, multi-platform native mobile design, development, debugging and deployment”, while the Xamarin Component Store provides access to code, including third-party libraries, native UI controls and themes.

Supporting app development in Visual Studio gives the eight million strong C# developer base access to the two major mobile platforms, iOS and Android. Apps built using Xamarin 2.0 will share up 90 per cent of their source code across mobile platforms.

“Xamarin 2.0 makes it even faster for all mobile developers to build great native apps that reach employees and consumers on all major platforms,” said Xamarin CEO and cofounder Nat Friedman.