[vblord]

I've been a life long Microsoft developer. So when I started down the mobile app path, I naturally gravitated to Xamarin. Xamarin allows you to build mobile apps in the best development IDE out there. This is true... but it has it's issues. I've created 3 andoid apps with Xamarin (and tried more), but each time i've run in to bugs or oddities that make life suck. I wish it was better, but if I could go back in time, I would have probably chosen a different language/tool. Maybe Unity if I still wanted to stay with the C#/VS IDE.

One nice thing about it is that all the methods/classes are named almost the same thing as native android. If you want to know how to do something, you can find the android solution and just change a few small things.

So my vote would be to not do Xamarin and to choose a different cross platform development environment. Cross platform is the key. If you do choose Xamarin, I would spend some time and do a little bit of training before jumping in. It's not like the ease of building windows applications in VS.