We launched an online training program called Xamarin University, and so we have a fair amount of data on how long it takes people to get to the point where they are proficient enough to write a production app. As you might expect it's highly varied. But the median is about 45 days to pass our certification.
I have been starting to learn how to write mobile applications with Xamarin to contribute to a friend's project and had not heard of Xamarin University until I saw this comment. Now that I have looked at it, I'm a little confused. I can understand charging for 1-on-1 help, interactive classes, and certification exams, but why wouldn't "recorded class videos, class labs and materials" be free? Don't you want it to be easy for people to use your software so that people will? Charging $1995/year for learning materials seems pretty steep.
The learning investment is what makes me most hesitant to use Xamarin. It was supposed to be less of a learning investment because we all have C#/.NET experience, but now I'm not so sure. It now seems like we're going to have to dive deep into learning iOS and Android specific UI concepts anyway, and on top of that learn Xamarin concepts and quirks, and if we want to continue using Visual Studio when the trial is up we'll have to pay $1000/year. Maybe we're just not the target market.
As for Xamarin University, the vast majority of that experience is live, interactive learning with a teacher. That's why it costs money. The recorded versions of those interactive classes aren't that useful on their own. But, we're working on developing some good standalone e-learning content and when we do it will be widely available.
If one is not burdened with knowing anything yet is it feasible to start and stay with C#/Xamarin alone or must one also master the other environments to fill gaps?
I'm sure they'll tell you that you can do this using Xamarin.Forms but we quickly realized that it is only useful for very basic UI. Anything of more than trivial complexity is going to require that you learn the platform specific frameworks and idioms (on top of learning Xamarin). At this point I have no idea if Xamarin is going to save time or cost time over going native. My guess is that it will depend on how much domain logic you can share between platforms.
I came from a pure C# background about a year ago and I found I was able to get up to be productive within a month and feel comfortable within about 3. The major sticking points for me have been understanding the iOS and Android development process and their respective APIs. I think if you've previously developed iOS applications and understand the view/viewcontroller and application lifecycle, the learning curve won't be huge. Xamarin does a great job of making you feel like you're developing natively in c#, but, as someone entirely new to iOS development, the native APIs just feel odd.
