The starting point: Xamarin discontinued, four production apps, no downtime allowed
DATAflor is the market leader for landscaping software in the DACH region. Its mobile apps — including the TIME app for time tracking and site documentation — ran on Xamarin, a Microsoft technology that was discontinued for the App Store without an adequate transition period.
The problem was acute: rising store requirements from Apple and Google, the risk of an App Store ban, a four-digit active user base and scarce internal capacity. Four apps had to be migrated. On schedule. Without loss of quality. Without downtime.
The challenge
In parallel with the migration, normal operations, new customer feature requests and ongoing bug fixes all continued:
- Microsoft discontinues Xamarin
- Four apps, scarce development capacity
- Four-digit user base, business as usual
Barcode scanner and camera are business-critical for users on site. Loss of quality was not an option, and an outage would have hit thousands of landscaping businesses in their daily work.
About the project: external help as a means to an end
DATAflor is an owner-managed software house from Göttingen with more than 40 years of market experience. Its managing director thinks rationally and cost-consciously: you bring in external support when it is faster and cheaper than building up internal capacity.
That was exactly the situation when first contact was made: a DATAflor developer posted a call in the .NET community, because Microsoft had discontinued Xamarin without an adequate transition period and internal capacity was not enough at short notice.
vensas delivered no external agency dynamics, but direct technical work within the DATAflor team. The collaboration was pragmatic, goal-oriented and without overhead. The project goal was clear: all four apps in the stores on schedule, no downtime.
