I need to use Visual Studio to use Xamarin. Xamarin is the platform, and Visual Studio is the IDE. I use Visual Studio 17.6.2 Community Edition for Mac.
The organization I'm working for is a retail company. We have hundreds and hundreds of stores across multiple countries and regions in the Middle East and Asia. The app I develop, build, and enhance is used by about 30,000 to 40,000 store employees across all these stores. It's a store management app that has a huge amount of functionality built into it. It can do inventory management, store receiving, and customer management. We built the app using Xamarin.Forms.
We not only have external people who use our app, but we also have in-house house people, especially store employees, who use the app, and that's where the MDM solution, Microsoft Intune, comes into play. Microsoft Intune is more for distributing the app internally to our store employees. It's a device management kind of thing. The apps automatically get upgraded without users being required to update the app. Intune does a whole lot of other things, like match policies or devices.