In a recent project the RedBit team worked on, we decided to use Xamarin.Form to build an app for Windows Phone, iOS and Android. Xamarin Forms is still a v1 product but the Xamarin team is rapidly releasing updates to fill in some gaps. As a developer you still have the opportunity to extend Xamarin Forms, for example by building custom renderers. We’ll have a series of blog posts on some learnings from the team to help extend Xamarin.Forms and meet our client’s requirements.
For this first post we’ll be looking at how to implement GZip Compression across iOS, Android and Windows. The benefit to using GZip is there is less data going over the wire reducing mobile data consumption. In the US it’s not much of a problem to send large amounts of data because of unlimited data plans, but in Canada (and other parts of the world) data is not so cheap. In terms of compression, here is a chart showing the difference in data size making a request to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gzip.
To read more about how to use GZip Compression with Xamarin Forms head over to the RedBit post to see the entire walkthrough.
