I have been playing around with MonoDroid for the past few weeks, mostly keeping an eye on how the betas have been progressing. I am very intrigued by the fact that I can use my normal development tools and language (Visual Studio 2010 & C#), even re-use existing libraries, to create a application that runs on Android.
However, while monitoring the mailing lists someone posed the question of licensing costs for MonoDroid once it reaches 1.0. Being that Mono is an open source project, I had assumed that there wouldn’t be a licensing cost… wrong. According the to the MonoDroid FAQ, while licensing hasn’t been finalized yet it will most likely follow a similar structure to MonoTouch (iOS version of Mono) and cost about $400 USD for an individual user and $1,000 USD for enterprise users.
Sorry, but as an individual user $400 USD seems a little steep for any small applications to be built using it. Even if I get 400 people to use my app and I only charge $0.99, I still won’t break even unless the application is a huge success. Then again, since C# and Java are so similar and Eclipse and the Android SDK are free, I could write core logic for the application in C# as a Web Service and then just building the UI in Java with Eclipse. No $400 USD entrance fee needed.
Would have been nice though… a WPF, Silverlight/Windows Phone 7, MVC, and Android app… all from the (mostly) same code base. Alas.
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