Android XML in Rider - Absolutely nothing works
I currently have an .NET iOS and Android app in Rider. In iOS it's fine because I'm using UIKit via C#, so building the UI is nice and easy. The Android story is completely different however. Put simply, not a single layout thing works.
For example, if I create a brand new .NET Android app in Rider, I am greeted by these errors from the activity_main.xml:
Element RelativeLayout is not allowed here
Element TextView is not allowed here
Then sometimes the preview just doesn't show. Other times I get complaints about URI is not registered (Settings | Languages & Frameworks | Schemas and DTDs). Sometimes restarting Rider fixes this and sometimes not.
Even after all of that, I get no autocomplete either. I also find using anything from the Xamarin.Google.Android.Material library to be absolutely difficult to use because I have to guess everything, because I have the IDE telling me everything is wrong and I don't get autocomplete.
To reproduce this you only need to make a new Android .NET project on either Rider 2025.2 RC 2 or 2025.1.4.
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Hello N0517018 ,
Thank you for reaching Rider Forum.
Unfortunately, you have faced known issues:
RIDER-72380 .NET 6 Android XML issue
RIDER-23226 Layout Designer not working properly
You may want to upvote the issues to subscribe to them.
At the moment the only workaround is to try using the Android Studio for the layout part.
Hope my reply was helpful.
Hi Anna Morozyuk,
This has been a known issue for 6 years?
Is there no fix in site? Does JetBrains really not want us to develop Android .NET apps?
Hello N0517018 ,
At the moment there is still no clear ETA for this issue.
Hence, please upvote it to receive updates.
Anna Morozyuk How do we get this on Jetbrains radar? Is it just getting people to upvote tickets to determine where the priorities should be?
Hello Beren!
It is a bit more complicated than just upvotes. Prioritizing consists of a lot of factors, including votes, affected customers, severity of the issue and so on. We check our backlog regularly to see what needs attention first. For now, these two issues are in our priority pool but have not been scheduled yet.
You can upvote them - to bring additional attention and also to get notified about all updates.