Perhaps of interest is that in the Xamarin.Forms application, blanking the form dropped build time to 60 seconds after restarting VS. This has made learning the framework extremely frustrating and borderline unusable. The physical device is a Sony Xperia Z2 running Android 5.0.2. The output window doesn't get populated until the final 10 seconds or so, which makes me wonder if it's doing nothing for the first 130 seconds. Visual Studio freezes during the build process sometimes. The status bar often reverts to 'ready' (or goes blank) for long periods of time (but while still building). The messages in the VS toolbar say 'build started.' for a long time and eventually changes to 'packaging application' after about 90 seconds. I've verified similar times from a plain Android application. All the other settings are the default for a Xamarin Forms project using PCLs. It takes 180 seconds without that option. This is with 'use fast deployment' enabled. I'm seeing a full deployment time of about 140 seconds (from the time I push the run button until the application appears on my device).

Mac android studio emulator slow