[Enhancement] MAUI Should be what UNO is trying to do

[jhancock4d]

Summary

Maui seems to be just a warmed over version of Xamarin Forms. Microsoft needs to go big and bold and make MAUI into the truly cross platform competitor it needs to be, and the obvious approach is to buy UNO and then make MAUI have all of the promised features (single project stuff) but have it working across Web, Windows, Android, iOS, MacOS, Linux, and fully implement WinUI 3 with pixel perfect rendering across platforms.

And, while you're at it, create a conversion tool that takes WinForms, WPF and UWP apps and converts them to this new project format and substitutes controls etc. automatically and provides todos for anything that can't be automatic with clear instructions on what needs to be done.

Build the entire thing open source and let other people/companies work on the conversion tool as well.

If you did this, you'd breathe new life into Windows development, unify windows development so that Windows developers can reach all the other platforms AND truly build on one Win UI 3 centric platform, and you'd have a true competitor to flutter. Uno has done most of the hard work here. The delta of full Win UI 3 support isn't that large anymore, and then you'd need to focus on getting all of the base plugins working on all platforms (sensors, bluetooth, web view, video player, openidconect view, etc.) Again, most of this work is done for almost everything other than web because of the work of Xamarin Essentials.

If you showed an early alpha at Build, you'd generate such excitement with this clear, obvious, and consistent vision that you'd have major developer interest, especially with Xamarin allowing developers to write C# code against the native apis so you don't need objective c or java or kotlin or C++ developers, which flutter still requires to get plugins and custom stuff working. And if you had Telerik and DevExpress etc. on stage with you telling the world that they're going to support this single surface area and that they'd work with the converter people to convert their stuff to Win UI 3 controls as well, you'd have a serious win.

And because Xamarin does the remote iOS simulator, you'd win against flutter even more.

And because C# isn't awful like Dart (very immature language, eventually it might not be awful but it is massively limiting now), you'd win there too especially with AOT and tree shaking getting you close to Flutter in size, especially if you allowed chunking on the web to chunk pages like Angular or Blazor.

Demo with code as UI like flutter/jetpack/Swift UI while you're at it, but show that XAML also works and that the converter will convert XAML to Code UI if you wish or keep XAML and that you can mix and match in the same project and you'd have a huge win, because then developers won't need to use XAML if they don't like it. (lots of people do not)

And what that does, is mean that Microsoft doesn't have to be building Blazor, Xamarin, Win UI 3, UWP, WPF, and WinForms and instead can focus on this single UI layer just like .net core allowed focusing on "one .net" and you're working to eliminate the mono as a separate project and bring it into one .net so no duplication.

And with the proper buyin, Microsoft as a whole would become more productive and agile because you'd have a single development set for all of your other apps and it would be vastly more effective and memory friendly than the current React Native insanity that's going on in Microsoft if done correctly. (and if you built this to be extensible, React Native could render using the same framework as well while you were switching and it would mean that Microsoft apps could share the rendering and look identical across all platforms. Think Outlook which is being redone in react native or Electron, instead being migrated over over time using the single rendering surface of this)

Intended Use Case

All development on all platforms including windows going forward under Microsoft.