It's cool to see xamarin growing after the microsoft acquisition. Replicating good existing features that other environments have (like exponent, etc) is a good

It's cool to see xamarin growing after the microsoft acquisition. Replicating good existing features that other environments have (like exponent, etc) is a good sign that things are progressing. Building apps with Xamarin however is still not a pleasant experience whether it be Native or Forms. Although Microsoft has built some cool apps with forms (check the microsoft github and you can find them), it's still a pain to work with things visually. Odd bugs and restrictions that require dense workarounds occur if you deviate from the standard application uses (tables and forms). It makes sense it being a targeted API so I'll leave it at that. Native was something I really wanted to like. I built 2 PoC apps that later got translated into swift/java and react-native respectively. Building your own libraries and widgets is fun, but not when you have a deadline. For non-visual libraries, it's awesome. I've worked with the .Net ecosystem for a while, and while the way libraries are written isn't my favorite (OverkillOOP sometimes), everything is consistent. Visual Libraries are rough. Quite a few I wanted to use were abandoned with no source code and just a link to download the nuget from the xamarin store. I could spend the time building the 10 custom widgets that the client REALLY wants (even though the app could work fine without it), or I could use native/RN UI libraries to wow the client giving them what they wanted and a little bit more in the same visual/design style. To sum it up: it's more work to write a xamarin application when I'm more than capable of handling 2 similar languages (most app requirements are just applying known patterns and library gluing anyways) or using Exponent/ReactNative. As a side note, I prefer F# and while the Xamarin team says they "like it", it is a pretty 2nd class system and definitely not something you want to use with a deadline.