[bitbuilder]

I've recently gone back to the .NET world after a decade long foray into mobile and front web dev. Honestly, I wish I'd gone back sooner.

.NET isn't popular with the cool kids, and you rarely see it mentioned here on HN. But man, it's just a joy to develop in. The C# language is incredibly elegant, the libraries are very well thought out, and Visual Studio with Intellicode just feels like a modern miracle. Development just feels really, really fun again.

One point to keep in mind with .NET: it also opens up the world of Unity dev to you. And there's a ton of really fun development to be done there in games, VR, etc. At the moment my days are filled with cranking out APIs for business apps, while my nights are filled with playing around with cool VR ideas in Unity. All in the same IDE and language.

The downsides to the .NET world: as others have and will mention, the great bulk of the opportunities out there will be in the business world, doing fairly mundane dev. But, they're stable (and relatively easy) jobs. Also, I find more often than not that your typical .NET project is horribly overengineered with layers upon layers of needless abstraction. (Now that I'm realizing just out easy .NET dev is, I'm beginning to suspect all the needless abstraction is just bored devs making themselves feel relevant.)

But you won't go wrong with either choice. iOS dev can be a lot of fun too. Good luck!