Visual Studio for Mac is a promising project, but it still needs to incorporate several necessary functionalities. The installation is difficult, and the main advantage of the Xamarin platform is still in development.
I want to briefly summarize how different it is to start with mobile application development for Windows in comparison to iOS. First of all, with Windows, you can build your own computer, sign up for the Windows Insider program, and run Windows 10 for free. Builds are not guaranteed to be stable, but the tradeoff is fair. You will test new OS builds and don’t have to pay for a software license. On the other hand, the only way to get macOS is by buying an Apple computer, which is less performant, more expensive, and does not allow for hardware upgrades.
When you are using Visual Studio, you are already using Visual Studio Team Services or your private Team Foundation Server. Plain and simple, you use TFVC (Team Foundation Version Control) because Git was not supported in Visual Studio for a long time. I think you already guess where I’m going with this. Visual Studio for Mac does not support TFVC yet. This means you have to create a new Team Foundation project, vote, hope, and wait for several months, or use a workaround. You have to install Java, then Eclipse, and finally the Team Explorer Everywhere plugin for Eclipse. Installing Java is anything but simple. I wasn’t able to install Eclipse because, although I installed the latest Java, I still had version 1.6.0, and the minimum required is 1.7. I had to install Java from a specialized site. (By the way, why is Oracle redirecting from the HTTPS protocol to HTTP in this link? Do they want to make us vulnerable to software attacks?) In Eclipse, it is very simple to connect to TFS. The latest dependency is Xcode with its iOS SDK.
In its current preview state, Visual Studio for Mac is a disappointment. At least TFVC should be supported. The whole project will make much more sense when .NET Standard 2.0 is released. On the other hand, the Xamarin.iOS Storyboard designer is far beyond the UWP XAML designer equivalent on Windows.