In iOS, things are simple. The deallocating code is very concise and safe. Why having the performance overhead of smart pointers?
On the other hand, it could be useful to have them in Java and avoid manual destruction. However, this wasn't investigated :(
It actually does let you build libraries, but those libraries also depend on Apportable's improved libc and libc++ environment and other libs you link. Admittedly the documentation is lacking how to do that exactly. That will improve soon.
I'm sorry if this wasn't clear. The purpose of building this library was to have something which could be distributable to any mobile developer, not just the ones using Xamarin. If you did it through Xamarin, you could only give it to Xamarin developers, which is very limiting. We need something that could be importable by most developers, especially native SDK ones.
Not once did the article talk about the C++ ABI which is one of the most important things a library developer needs to be aware of (as opposed to an application developer).
The C++ ABI is unstable. You can't effectively deploy 3rd party libraries with that either.
Android ships with multiple versions of the compiler, each one of those are incompatible with each other's standard library. On top of that, Android ships multiple C++ standard libraries for each compiler, all of which are not-interoperable either. Then Android updates the compiler with each NDK drop introducing more potential incompatibilities.
The end result is you can't deploy prebuilt C++ libraries (a prickly issue for commercial/proprietary code) unless you can force users to use your exact toolchain. But library writers usually can't fairly dictate those terms, especially if the users want intermix libraries from other sources which may use a different toolchain.
It does actually let you build libraries, just not entirely documented.
You are right though. Those libraries will link Apportable's extended/improved libc (called libv) and libc++ and would require distributing more parts of the platform (it can get a little hairy there). It is also true that the out of the box experience is one that is meant for just apps but it's built on a layer cake and at a lower level you can use it to compile libraries. This is how it builds dependencies in your Xcode project today.
