[jmkni]

I do Android dev in Visual Studio with Xamarin.

Your app is structured the same as a native one (Activities, Receivers, Services, Layouts, etc) and the XML for your layouts is identical, but you get to work in C# and don’t have to deal with Gradle etc.

I like it.

[elboru]

What downsides does it have compared to a more traditional environment? I'm a C# developer so Xamarin sounds really tempting, it's just that I don't want to break my head on "simple" stuff I could easily avoid with a traditional environment

[titanix2]

You still have to learn the underlying story platform and API, that’s not abstracted. Also choosing between Xamarin Forms and Xamarin Native for the UI (not compatible between them). Obscure errors sometimes.

But from my (little) experience on it, getting to an app running and start working on it is way mire easy than with the Java approach. Give it a try :)

[pasta]

Maybe the designer isnt that good.

But overall it's much better. And you get:

Shared models with your web api, reusable business for iOS and Windows, great tools like ReSharper, and so on.