There seems to be some behavioral differences between attaching a swipe gesture on android and iOS. The actual gesture recognizer is attached to a stacklayout, which is the parent of a number of other views. One of those views is a scrollview, which I suspect to be the problem. Swiping on the scrollview works on iOS, but not on android.
I have no clue as to how to work around this problem as it seems to be a bug in Xamarin.forms. Has anyone encountered and managed to fix this problem?