u/Cat_Best

I just finished building a business app, and I came to the conclusion that MAUI doesn't seem ready (performance wise) for production apps that must run on low end Android devices (such as the Sunmi V2, for example).

The fact is: it runs REALLY well on newer devices and newer Android Versions, to the point where it's difficult to see any difference from the same app built in .NET for Android.
But on older devices it's a completely different beast; in particular:

1. A CollectionView which benefits from the virtualization is still slow (for example when you need to completely reset its binding source, e.g. after applying a filter), and its scrolling is choppy
2. In general, every time you need to create and display a new View on the fly, staying on the same page (e.g. to display it as an overlay, or to be added on a preexisting container), that operation lags, even when this new View is very simple.

To make the app usable, I had to completely rewrite some core components with platform specific code and ViewHandlers.
For example, I had to implement a simple "view builder", that on Windows translates directly to a Maui CollectionView, but on Android translates to a native ListView and Adapter, to fully take advantage of its virtualization and view recycling, without any of the Maui overhead; the scrolling became fluid even on Debug builds (hundreds of items, with each item changing its properties and notifying their changes every second), while before it was lagging on Release builds (with static informations), on the same low end device.
I tried EVERYTHING before going this route, even simplifying the ItemTemplate to a single Label: nothing helped.

Of course, I'm talking about a Release, production build.

Since the difference between low and mid end devices was so huge, I started to have doubts about the minimum and suggested requirements for .NET Maui on Android (both software and hardware), but I found only "Android 5.0 (API 21)" on the Microsoft documentation, without any reference to CPU or RAM requirements; does anybody know? Or are there known issues with specific Android versions (e.g. Android 11)?

(Just another thing that made me suspect that maybe Android 5 is not even the actual minimum requirement: the built-in MauiSplashscreen doesn't work well on Android 11 or lower, only the background color is shown, without the icon; I guess another thing to rewrite myself if any customer complains about it).

Also: did anyone have a similar experience?

The relevant parts from my csproj:

<TargetFrameworks>net10.0-android</TargetFrameworks>
<MauiEnableXamlCBindingWithSourceCompilation>true</MauiEnableXamlCBindingWithSourceCompilation>
<MauiXamlInflator>SourceGen</MauiXamlInflator>
<WarningsAsErrors>$(WarningsAsErrors);MAUIG2045</WarningsAsErrors>

Maui version: 10.0.51

PS: sorry for my bad English