I will re-iterate the "Stay the hell away from Xam.Forms" as we've used it at work for almost 1.5 years.
I just convinced our management to move away from it when I migrated a page from Xamarin.Forms to regular Xamarin.Android. The page render time went from 2,000ms to 400ms.
A quick glance on the now-open source code of Xamarin Forms now shows you why the perf is so sluggish (the whole thing seems like it was hacked together by a college intern as a week-end project).
Xamarin seems to have a marketing team that is far ahead of their development team.
As a person who's used XF for the last 2 years in my company, stay away from Xamarin.Forms. I can see some of the appeal for the regular Xamarin.iOS and .Droid but the performance of Xamarin.Forms on Android is absolutely horrible even after optimizing it to an insane amount. Think several seconds render times per page on a Nexus 5X (on a page that takes 200ms if written using Xamarin Android).
They've been denying it's a problem for over a year, and then acknowledged it a few months ago and did nothing about it.
The platform itself also harbors a lot of bizarre and difficult bugs that only cause a couple of crashes each under some very specific conditions that are nearly impossible repro consistently. But there are so many of them that on a given day, 5% of our apps will crash or freeze because of some Garbage Collector bug, a platform bug, or some platform race condition. Just check how many of the bugzilla bugs are still in the NEW state.
I just convinced our management to move away from it when I migrated a page from Xamarin.Forms to regular Xamarin.Android. The page render time went from 2,000ms to 400ms.
A quick glance on the now-open source code of Xamarin Forms now shows you why the perf is so sluggish (the whole thing seems like it was hacked together by a college intern as a week-end project).
Xamarin seems to have a marketing team that is far ahead of their development team.