I am using Xamarin with Visual Studio 2015. Recently I updated to sp3.
Now I want to publish my android app. From information elsewhere I understood that now this is supposed to be done by the function/option "Archive" available by right-clicking the project or under the option/menu "Build".
However this option is grayed out for me, just as the function/option "View Archives". This is the case for all my android projects.
I already tried out/made sure of the things mentioned in the second answer of the older similar question.
Publish Android App option in disabled in Xamarin using Visual studio 2015
I eventually solved this problem by deciding it was a good time to do a total Windows 10 refresh (and thus doing a fresh visual studio 2015 install as well). This solved a lot other issues I had with my computer/visual studio as well. By lack of better I will mark this as the answer.