Not trying to do anything unusual or otherwise exotic. Just using VS 2017 (15.9.6) to build an app that runs on my Marshmallow (v6.0) phone. The app in question is nothing more than the default "Welcome to Xamarin.Forms!". After a 2 day ordeal I finally was able to deploy the app to my phone where it promptly threw an exception:
01-31 10:07:56.664 32388 32388 E AndroidRuntime: Process: com.companyname.App1.Android, PID: 32388
01-31 10:07:56.664 32388 32388 E AndroidRuntime: java.lang.RuntimeException: Unable to get provider mono.MonoRuntimeProvider: java.lang.RuntimeException: Unable to find application Mono.Android.Platform.ApiLevel_27 or Xamarin.Android.Platform!
Is VS 2017 not honoring the minimum target framework (which is set to v6.0) when generating the apk? It ran fine in the VisualStudio_Android-23_arm_phone emulator so what gives? There are a lot of devices running Marshmallow - it isn't that old. How do I build an app that runs on an Android Marshmallow device?