My startup screen shows two buttons and a label in a StackLayout, and does nothing more. I've timed the app to take 2.5~3.0 seconds just to show that screen, in Release mode, on an actual device (Motorola Mini XT1030). That's an absurd and unacceptable amount of time to show nothing to the user. As far as I can tell, there's no way to show a splash-screen during that initial loading.
Yes, I'm using [assembly: XamlCompilation(XamlCompilationOptions.Compile)] (without it startup times are around 4.2s!). Running Xamarin Profiler, I see that 100% of the startup code is out of my control.
Is there anything else I can do to speed up my startup times? Or is Xamarin Forms really still not production-ready, and I should start recreating all my UIs on every platform?