grpc-dotnet on Xamarin.Android

[Benjamin Krämer]

We saw the announcement that Grpc.Core will be deprecated now. We have the use case to run a gRPC service hosted in an Android application. With Grpc.Core, that's easily possible, since monoandroid90 supports netstandard2.1.

We saw, that Grpc.AspNetCore.Server needs netcoreapp3.0 or net5.0 as dependency. AFAIK monoandroid90 is not compatible to netcoreapp3.0.

We also saw, that Xamarin.Android should now also be able to target net5.0. Is this enough to get grpc-dotnet running on Xamarin.Android or what are the plans to support Xamarin.Android also on the server side once Grpc.Core is ending in May 2022?

[Jan Tattermusch]

Hey, 

the exact future of gRPC support on Xamarin is a bit unclear at this point. AFAIK, net60 (which will be released later this year) should be the unification point for Xamarin and .NET - so starting from net60 it should not matter nearly as much if you're targeting .NET Core or Xamarin. That also gives us the chance that Grpc.AspNetCore.Server will "magically" start working on Xamarin - we will find out later this year.

Ad Xamarin.Android on net50 - AFAIK that's not enough. Xamarin.Android on net60 should be different.

Ad Grpc.Core's support for Xamarin: We're not planning to remove the existing packages so you if need, you can continue using them (there just won't be new releases). From the perspective of official support, this actually doesn't change much because the Grpc.Core's support for Xamarin is (and always has been) documented as "experimental only" and we weren't providing any guarantees that it

works (even though in practice it works pretty well to my knowledge) - so even your current use of it a bit of a grey zone since there's no official support for Grpc.Core.Xamarin.