As part of Microsoft’s layoffs this week, “key figures” on the MAUI team were let go. More coverage here, including this ifnotnil-relevant quote:
If you have to do this cross-platform stuff with .NET for mobile apps and stuff, just go for Uno or Avalonia
doesnt sound good for sure
although the video seems to la out they sacked people in all kinds of areas that would seem to be in one of their focus areas
MAUI felt dead when it was first released as beta. And there is no real outcome since a long time. It is standing still. Many people started to rely their projects on it resulting in: going to another framework. The stupid part behind is that MAUI was a great chance for C#/Dotnet. But MS has it’s own decisions.
It has been my impression all along that Uno or Avalonia had more coherent vision and mature features than MAUI. Last time I dug into them, I liked Avalonia better, but Uno now has a lot of new tooling, in particular, a designer, that may give it an edge for some.
There’s also something called WiseJ.NET that should be attractive to people with an existing WinForms code base.
This may be a situation where MSFT has gotten in over their head somewhat and then realized that Uno and Avalonia have already owned the space. It wouldn’t be the first time a large corporation has cut its losses to focus elsewhere. Paradoxically, a cash-rich corporation probably finds it easier to escape sunk cost fallacies.
Avalonia is introducing a designer as part of a paid plan. Base Avalonia will continue as open source; these will be tools on top of that.
The key difference between Avalonia and Uno is that Avalonia’s controls are 100% drawn (And thus cross-platform pixel perfect), while Uno uses a mix of drawn and native (in fact similar to what MAUI did, which is why, with the momentum Uno already had, I couldn’t see MAUI competing in adoption other than having MS behind it).
One of the articles noted some weight put behind WinForms at the same time as these layoffs, which is kind of interesting considering all of the various UI frameworks Microsoft now has in play.
Strange discussion… Microsoft is for me dead since I switched away in 2007 
I recently read an article about M$ devopment frameworks and the author pointed out that i.e. the M$365 team does not rely on those tools and APIs that M$ offers to external developers.
They don’t eat their own dogfood.
They never did… 25 years ago there was a Windows Logo Program for Vendors and Develeopers, how to write proper Software for Windows, in which folders what information should be written etc. Only if you comply with this design guides and rules, you were entitled to put a Windows Compatibility Logo on your product package. It was frustrating to see how Microsoft with its products broke his own guidelines over and over again.
Apple does the same
All those guidelines about how get into the App Store yet for years Xcode was the worst offender
Its better now but still not sure its completely compliant with their App Store rules
One reason Xojo couldn’t get in there - it required privileges to do things Apple gave a giant NYET to
Not only that, also it is so that they start to hide their api’s. And this api hiding and closing for developers makes it also not more comfortable to build ui based solutions for ios. Apples tries always to bring developers to their own direction. You ma yhave no chance without them. In europe you have at least alternative appstores. In US you are tied to the apple behavior at all.
I still hope that apple changes this behavior one day.
Apple has for a long time had private frameworks that eventually seemed to make it out into the wild
But sometimes that length of time was so long that people had no choice but to use a private framework
At one time that would preclude you getting into the App Store
Saying that from experience
Not sure if that now also means you cant be notarized or not
It might not since the app isnt checked the same way as a submission to the App Store is
See:
WinForms in a 64-Bit world - our strategy going forward - .NET Blog.
This focuses on the 32 => 64 bit transition, and to a lesser extent, on the .NET Framework => .NET Core transition. It has created quite an architectural and technical challenge for MSFT to navigate this, but they seem to be putting a lot of resources into making it happen.
For its part, WiseJ.NET, which allows targeting WinForms apps to the web has made comparable investments to keep up with all this; their current 4.0 release appears fully in step with recent MSFT changes. They also have a “Hybrid” version that targets IOS and Android from a single codebase, though I haven’t researched it enough to tell you if you could also include the web target in that same codebase. I think it is still in prerelease or at least suffering from “VersionOneItis”.
This is also apparently the mode you now have to use to target desktop, as the prior Desktop mode is deprecated. However, it appears the hybrid mode is based on .NET MAUI… 
This is what often happens to smaller outfits like the maker of WiseJ.NET … they have to scramble to accommodate all the shims MSFT is putting into to effect the 32 to 64 bit and Framework to Core transitions, and figure out what their cross platform strategy is going to be, and whoopsie, they chose MAUI – probably with assurances from their contacts at MSFT that this was safe …
When I was tech editor of FoxTalk in the Long Ago, I remember interviewing the dev team right after MSFT bought Fox Software and being assured that the Xenix and Mac versions of FoxPro were safe … I had clients committed based on that, and then a year later, those versions were gone, replaced by Win16, Win32s and Win32 versions. Complete change of strategy. I never believed a word they said since, and it looks like nothing has changed.