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Comment by duckworth | Hacker News Reader

I went to install it and it seems to be forcing me to download another full Android SDK to a private location without the option the specifying the existing Android SDK location that I already have set up. A quick search show this as an open issue that is 5 years old https://bugzilla.xamarin.com/show_bug.cgi?id=859

I lost interest already.

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I agree with you totally. I bounce between macOS and Windows for development, and I wish they'd take a better approach with dependency management.

I hope that the approach with the VS Mac installer ends up going the way of VS 2017 on Windows. I love the fact that I can choose say ".NET development" in the installer and turn off unneeded packages.

Same thing here. I don't care about Android development, just about Xamarin for iOS and Mac and .NET Core. I cancelled the installation as it tries to install some Java and Android SDK which I don't want. Better luck next time.

It sounds like you're done messing with it; but if you're not, you can install it without the Android/Java stuff. If you let the installer start running, but deny it elevation to write to your system directories when prompted, it will throw up a "manual install" dialog with instructions and links to download the individual components separately.

Then you can download just the IDE, the Mono framework, and the Xamarin.Mac or Xamarin.iOS pieces if you want them.

You can also just go straight into the app menu and there's a "Show manual installation instructions" item there that pulls up the same dialog

That's weird because the Xamarin Studio installer definitely has an option to set your own API location.

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