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You must know how the UI work in both oses if you want to be capable of using xamarin efficently. Yeah, there is XamarinForms that tries to solve that problem, but it is very... bad, right now.

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Xamarin forms is good for very limited uses. They give the basic layouts that each platform supports and that's about it. So if your app is simple, it's a great option.

Anyone who is serious about cross platform mobile development, whether it be Xamarin or React, needs to be well versed in Cocoa and the Android SDK.

> Anyone who is serious about cross platform mobile development, whether it be Xamarin or React, needs to be well versed in Cocoa and the Android SDK.

Then why would I go the Xamarin route in the first place? The whole point is to avoid having to learn both platforms. Personally, I'd rather struggle with two native codebases than to struggle learning an imperfect abstraction that still requires me to learn both platforms.

For me the point is being able to reuse the core code, in this case the logic of a small game, but it could be API integration just as easily.

So far the C# abstraction of Android has if anything been easier to use than the official Java API, or at the very least less verbose.

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