When comparing JetBrains Rider vs Xamarin.Android, the Slant community recommends Xamarin.Android for most people. In the question“What are the best IDEs for Android development?” Xamarin.Android is ranked 5th while JetBrains Rider is ranked 7th. The most important reason people chose Xamarin.Android is:
Xamarin is a platform on which you can build cross-platform mobile applications for Android, iOS and Windows Mobile and use only one codebase.
Specs
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Pros
Pro New C# IDE based on ReSharper and the IntelliJ platform
ReSharper is a popular Visual Studio Extension for .NET Developers. IntelliJ IDEA is a popular and fully featured JAVA IDE.
Pro Superior "quality of life" features
Extremely good at filling in all the mindless boilerplate type code while you stay productive.
Pro Fast performant
Rider has everything you want from a serious IDE, but without the bloat. This results in significantly fast performance in day to day operations.
Pro Multiple runtime support
Project Rider supports the .NET Framework and Mono, with CoreCLR support in the works. It also includes templates for creating new projects, and when you create an empty project, it's literally empty
Pro Cross-platform
As well as running and debugging multiple runtimes, Project Rider itself runs on multiple platforms. It runs on Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux.
Pro Decompile code for any .net library
Pro Version control integration
Intellij plugins for Git, Mercurial, and TFS plus Local History of files.
Pro Supports all the development lifecycle
Project Rider can build MSBuild and XBuild solutions as well as DNX/.NET CLI projects, and allows debugging .NET and Mono applications. DNX/.NET CLI debugging and CoreCLR support are coming.
Pro Excellent UI, Features beyond Visual Studio (File Layout just one example)
Pro Free for Students
With a university email, Rider can be obtained for free.
Pro Cross-platform
Xamarin is a platform on which you can build cross-platform mobile applications for Android, iOS and Windows Mobile and use only one codebase.
Pro Fast build
Faster compared to Gradle-based systems.
Pro Allows .NET programmers to write Android Apps
Allows .NET programmers to write Android Apps.
Pro Programming in C#
Allows you to write your programs in C#, a language much superior to Java, regarding expressiveness, readability and overall productivity.
Pro Open source
Xamarin.Android and the whole Xamarin SDK is free and open source and released under the MIT license.
Cons
Con Not free
Project Rider has a trial version available, but is not free.
Con No support for dotTrace, dotMemory yet on macOS
Support is promised on macOS, but currently only available on Windows. This means it’s not ideally suited for performance tracing and debugging.
Con Is RAM hungry
This product can hang a huge amount of RAM memory, up to 4 GB.
Con Relatively young project
Some bugs are to be expected since it's still a relatively young project.
Con Abnormal key maps
Though Visual Studio Key Map can be installed, it is still hard to find where the plugins are installed when one uses it to open a solution for the first time.
Con Lacking third-party library support
Having to use third-party libraries in Xamarin can be a real pain. Since Xamarin uses C# and third-party libraries are written in Java, you have to create bindings to use them in a Xamarin app. Which is cumbersome and wastes a lot of time. Especially considering that the Xamarin docs are not very good when it comes to this part.
Con Too large to download
Since core Visual Studio comes about in 543 MB of download size, the Mobile App Development with C++ workload comes about ~4 GB, the issues with your bandwidth and internet connection can cause the components to re-download, wasting a considerable amount of internet.