Detailed steps of the installation are as follows:

1) Easiest is to start with the manual installation procedure for Xamarin.Android as per the instructions on the Xamarin website.

Proceed up until step 4. It is important to note here that a common source of error is that more than one version of Android SDK Build-tools gets installed if you use the Xamarin Universal Installer after installing the Android SDK manually. Due to this bug we recommend the clean and transparent manual installation procedure over the automated one. Make sure you have the latest and only the latest version of Android SDK Tools / Android SDK Platform-tools / Android SDK Build-tools on your build machine. Delete any other versions from Android SDK Manager if necessary.

2) Download Microsoft Portable Library Tools 2 for Visual Studio 2010 and run the installer from the Command Prompt with the ‘/buildmachine’ switch:

C:\>PortableLibraryTools.exe /buildmachine

The command line switch will let you install the tools without a copy of Visual Studio.

3) Download and install the Microsoft .NET Portable Library Reference Assemblies 4.6 package. Now go into ‘C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft .NET Portable Library Reference Assemblies 4.6\’ and extract the ‘PortableReferenceAssemblies.zip’ archive into assemblies directory ‘C:\Program Files (x86)\Reference Assemblies\Microsoft\Framework\.NETPortable\’.

4) Log in to you Xamarin account, go to ‘Downloads’ and download the latest version of the all-in-one Xamarin.Android+Xamarin Studio+Visual Studio extensions installer (but NOT! the Universal Installer). To do this you have to click ‘View all versions’ under the big download button, select ‘Windows’ then ‘x.y.z – Latest version (release date)’. Finally, run the installer and hopefully you’re done.

By now you should be able to load and build PCL projects. For starters create a blank app with Xamarin.Forms Portable (found under C#/Mobile Apps/Blank App (Xamarin.Forms Portable)), build it then run it on the emulator.

There’s an ongoing forum discussion on the related issues in the Xamarin forums.

We create all kinds of mobile and web apps for clients; we are not talking about games here but business / utility apps. As clients usually want a ‘mobile’ app and not an iOS app anymore, we decided to go cross platform with Xamarin. It’s a great choice as it gives you the ability to still publish native apps on different devices instead of dealing with HTML5-based ‘solutions’.

We are also creating our new game in Unity which means finally we are going cross-platform with games as well! Stay tuned for that, it’s coming soon!

So many of you have been asking about the Android version of Soctics.. believe me, nothing would make me happier than having it already available. We’ve started the porting actually a long time ago but for various reasons we are always hitting one wall or another..

However, we haven’t given up on bringing Soctics to the world outside iOS. We’ll port it with Unity and hopefully still this year a significantly bigger audience can enjoy our competitive turn based football game

After the Unity port is complete, we’ll be able to introduce some new stuff in Soctics but it will have to wait for now. Mostly we are talking about some iterative changes and probably some cosmetics, nothing that would re-shape the game. We are pretty satisfied with how the game feels at the moment.

That’s it folks!

We follow a classic App Store model with Soctics: we offer a separate free and a paid version.  Our most recent promotion with AppGratis had an amazing effect on our numbers. On the day of the promotion with them, they generated more than 450.000 downloads for us. It’s a mindblowing number! We made the paid version free during the promotion and climbed to the top charts easily in many countries. I’ve collected the best spots we gained on the free charts according to AppAnnie during the promotion day.

The chart above gives some good ideas about comparative market sizes for the free apps. Look at the US market where we barely entered the top 10 overall apps with 110k downloads while about 50k is enough to come out as the overall top app in any other market.

After we switched Soctics back to paid, we managed to climb the paid charts a decent extent given our huge momentum.

Revenue numbers are estimates here but good enough for presentation purposes. The app’s price is $1.99 and the offered IAPs have been bringing about 25% of our total revenue on top of that. Combining this with the download numbers we see close estimates for each country, showing revenue levels required to climb the top grossing charts. There’s a significant difference between the paid and the grossing positions, this is of course just another evidence how strong IAP revenue is today in the App Store economy.

Again, the massive size difference between the US and anything else is trivial based on these numbers. Another surprise was the bad shape the Spanish market seems to be in. Given the fact that we are talking about a country with nearly 50 million people, I really expected a stronger app economy there.

I hope you find these results informative in case you were wondering what it meant to be on the top of the charts in these countries.