Should You Bother with a UI Kit in Xamarin.Forms or .NET MAUI Projects?

If you’ve ever sat down to build an app, you already know how quickly things can go from “this’ll be fun” to “why am I still adjusting padding on this button three hours later?” Especially in Xamarin.Forms or .NET MAUI, where you’re trying to make everything work on both iOS and Android, maybe even Windows, and somehow keep it all looking good. That’s where UI Kits come in. They promise to save you time, give you better design, and keep things consistent. But do they actually deliver? Are they worth it?

Let’s just start with what they are. A UI Kit is a pack of ready-made stuff—buttons, cards, forms, full pages—styled and organized so you can just plug them into your app. It’s like having a designer hand you a finished puzzle, and all you have to do is connect the pieces. Sounds great, right?

Honestly, in a lot of cases, yeah—it is.

Advantages of Using UI Kits

If you’re building something alone or with a small team, or if design just isn’t your thing, a UI Kit can feel like a lifesaver.

• Speed and Efficiency: Take something like the Grial UI Kit, for example. It has hundreds of prebuilt screens and templates you can use right away. Want a login screen that works on both platforms and doesn’t look like it was made in 2010? Drop it in, change the colors, hook it to your code, and done. It gives you a huge head start.
• Enhanced Quality and Professionalism: But it’s not just about speed. It’s also about quality. Most developers are good at writing logic, but not all of us are great at choosing colors or laying out a settings screen that doesn’t feel cramped. A well-made UI Kit was put together by actual designers, people who think about padding and visual flow for a living. Using one can instantly make your app feel more polished, more professional—even if you’ve only been working on it for a couple days.
• Design Consistency: And then there’s consistency. This one’s huge. If you’re building all your screens from scratch, it’s so easy to end up with little differences everywhere—a button that’s slightly taller on one screen, text that doesn’t line up quite right on another. Nobody notices one small inconsistency, but a bunch of them adds up. It makes your app feel off, even if people can’t quite say why. UI Kits help with that. Since everything’s built with the same design rules, you get that consistency for free.

Potential Drawbacks of UI Kits

Now, with all that said, let’s not pretend UI Kits are perfect.

• Cost: First off, they cost money. The good ones, anyway. Grial isn’t free. If you’re just playing around with an idea or working on a side project with no budget, dropping a few hundred dollars on a kit can feel like a lot. And you always run the risk that you’ll pay for it and then find it doesn’t quite fit what you had in mind.
• Learning Curve: Even when you do get a good kit, it’s not like you can just plug it in and forget about it. You’ll need to spend some time learning how it works, how to change things, how to avoid breaking the styles when you make your own tweaks.
• Customization Challenges: And if your app has unusual flows or a really unique layout, sometimes you find yourself bending over backwards trying to force the kit to do something it wasn’t really built to do. That’s frustrating.

The Evolving Landscape: .NET MAUI

Another thing: .NET MAUI itself is getting better. It fixes a lot of the weirdness from Xamarin.Forms, gives you more flexibility, and actually makes it a bit easier to build your own UIs without starting from scratch every time. If you already have some design experience—or a designer helping out—you might not need a UI Kit at all. MAUI lets you build nice-looking stuff without fighting with the system too much.

But still… when you’re racing to finish a project, or when you just want to impress a client with something that looks done even if the backend isn’t ready yet, a UI Kit can help you get there fast. You show off a polished, working prototype, the client’s happy, you look like a magician, and everyone wins. You can find more about modern UI development at Grial Kit.