Uno Platform is becoming a co-maintainer of SkiaSharp alongside Microsoft's .NET team — formalizing years of deep investment, and directly accelerating SkiaSharp 4.0's arrival for the entire .NET ecosystem.
Today, the .NET team at Microsoft announced SkiaSharp 4.0 Preview 1 — the first major release of SkiaSharp in nearly two years, bringing a modernized Skia engine, new interop generation, and updated APIs to the entire .NET ecosystem. We are thrilled to share that Uno Platform is stepping into a formal co-maintainer role for SkiaSharp alongside the .NET team at Microsoft, and that we contributed significantly to making this 4.0 release happen.
We are also co-hosting a live event with the .NET team at Microsoft on June 30th, 11am – 2pm ET, dedicated entirely to SkiaSharp 4.0. Register at platform.uno/skiasharp to join us.
Why SkiaSharp Is Central to Uno Platform
SkiaSharp is a core part of how Uno Platform delivers consistent UI rendering across every target platform.
Uno Platform's promise is that a single C# and XAML codebase can produce pixel-accurate, high-performance applications on iOS, Android, Windows, macOS, Linux, and WebAssembly. Delivering on that promise requires a rendering foundation that works faithfully and consistently across all of those surfaces. SkiaSharp is that foundation for developers who want it.
For teams that choose the SkiaSharp rendering path, the benefits are significant. Every draw call, text rendering decision, and image output goes through a single, well-tested graphics pipeline. The result is visual consistency that holds up across mobile, desktop, and web targets from the same codebase. Pixel fidelity, color accuracy, and rendering behavior are predictable regardless of which platform the application runs on.
SkiaSharp also brings a strong performance profile to this rendering model. The graphics pipeline is optimized for throughput, and it performs particularly well in demanding scenarios such as data-rich UIs, custom drawing surfaces, and WebAssembly targets where rendering efficiency has a direct impact on user experience.
This is why SkiaSharp's health directly affects Uno Platform's ability to serve its users well. We have been one of the most active contributors to SkiaSharp for years, and formalizing that investment as co-maintenance was a logical next step.
What's New in SkiaSharp 4.0
SkiaSharp 4.0 Preview 1 delivers nearly two years of Skia engine updates to the .NET ecosystem. Here is what the release focuses on:
SkiaSharp 4.0 ships with Skia milestone 147 – two and a half years and 28 milestones of upstream rendering, quality, and security improvements that benefit your apps automatically:
- Sharper downscaled images – mipmap sharpening is now on by default.
- Automatic photo orientation – image codecs now respect Exif rotation metadata.
- Improved large image handling – oversized bitmaps automatically tile to fit GPU texture limits.
- More accurate colors – transfer functions for Rec.709, HLG, and PQ corrected to match industry standards.
- Incremental performance gains – rendering operations across the board are modestly faster, with specific improvements to noise shaders and canvas operations.
- Security hardened – modern compiler mitigations enabled across all platforms, and all bundled native dependencies updated with security fixes.
New Capabilities - Here’s what’s new in Preview 1, with more on the way in upcoming previews:
- Variable fonts – full OpenType variable font axis control across SkiaSharp and HarfBuzz. Query axes, set positions, and create typeface variants for weight, width, slant, or custom axes.
- Color font palettes – switch between OpenType CPAL palettes for emoji and icon fonts, or override individual glyph colors.
- SKPathBuilder – the modern way to construct paths. SKPath is now immutable under the hood, with SKPathBuilder providing the familiar MoveTo/LineTo/CubicTo API plus shape factories. Existing SKPath methods remain available for backward compatibility.
- Linux Bionic and Tizen 64-bit – new native build targets for Android-based Linux systems and Samsung Tizen x64/arm64 devices.
Broader and more complete cross-platform coverage. SkiaSharp targets consistent graphics rendering with .NET on WebAssembly, iOS, Android, Windows, macOS, and Linux. 4.0 delivers on this scope more completely than any prior release.
This is a preview release. The team plans to ship additional previews on a regular cadence through summer, giving commercial users, partner teams, and the community adequate time to evaluate, migrate, and provide feedback before the final release.
Review the full roadmap and open work at SkiaSharp v4 Release Tracking, and download the preview package from the Microsoft announcement. If you are building on Uno Platform today, this is a good time to start exploring what SkiaSharp 4.0 will mean for your application. Get started with Uno Platform →
PS: Want to see what's possible with latest SkiaSharp? Check out SkiaFiddle - linked from the SkiaSharp gallery.
What Co-Maintenance Means for the Uno Platform Community
For Uno Platform users, this change has practical consequences that go beyond the 4.0 release itself.
As co-maintainers, the Uno Platform engineering team has a direct, ongoing role in SkiaSharp's development and release process. Issues that affect Uno Platform users — rendering behavior on WebAssembly, performance regressions, API gaps relevant to cross-platform .NET development — now have a team with deep context actively working to address them. We are part of the process that produces fixes and improvements, not waiting on them.
It also means a faster turnaround on the kinds of Skia updates that matter to cross-platform developers. The gap between a new capability landing in the Skia engine and that capability becoming available in SkiaSharp has historically been measured in months or longer. With Uno Platform contributing actively as a co-maintainer alongside the .NET team, that gap will close significantly.
More broadly, this represents a stronger long-term commitment to SkiaSharp as critical infrastructure for the .NET ecosystem. The library now has organizational support from two teams that both ship SkiaSharp-dependent products — a much healthier foundation for the ecosystem going forward.
For developers building on Uno Platform, co-maintenance translates directly to better outcomes at the graphics layer:
- Faster resolution of SkiaSharp issues that affect cross-platform .NET applications
- More predictable release cadence for SkiaSharp updates and improvements
- Direct representation of cross-platform rendering needs in SkiaSharp's development direction
- Greater stability in the graphics layer that underpins every Uno Platform application
Part of a Broader Collaboration with Microsoft
The co-maintenance of SkiaSharp is one concrete output of the broader technology collaboration between Uno Platform and the .NET team at Microsoft announced last October. That collaboration spans multiple areas of the .NET platform, including Android bindings, AOT compilation improvements, and .NET 10 contributions.
SkiaSharp is where that collaboration is most directly visible to Uno Platform users and to the wider .NET ecosystem. It is also a good illustration of what the collaboration is designed to produce: focused engineering investment in shared infrastructure that benefits the broadest possible set of .NET developers.
A Note from Jérôme Laban, CTO of Uno Platform
"SkiaSharp has been a foundational part of how Uno Platform delivers rendering consistency across platforms since the beginning. Taking on a co-maintenance role is a formalization of the work we have been doing for years. What changes is that the Uno Platform engineering team is now directly in the loop for releases, triage, and direction. For our users, that means fewer gaps between what Skia supports and what SkiaSharp exposes, and faster resolution of the rendering-layer issues that actually affect cross-platform .NET applications in production. We are proud to do this alongside the .NET team at Microsoft, and we think the whole .NET ecosystem will benefit."
Join Us: SkiaSharp 4.0 Live Event
To mark the release, Uno Platform and the .NET team at Microsoft are hosting a live event dedicated entirely to SkiaSharp.
Date: June 30th, 11am – 2pm ET
Where to watch:
- Uno Platform channels on YouTube, X (Twitter), and LinkedIn
- Microsoft .NET and .NET Foundation channels on Twitch
Register and get event details at platform.uno/skiasharp →. The event will cover what is new in SkiaSharp 4.0, what the co-maintenance model looks like in practice, and what is ahead for SkiaSharp in the .NET ecosystem.
Try Uno Platform
SkiaSharp 4.0 is arriving at a time when cross-platform .NET development has never been more capable. If you are building applications that need to run well across mobile, desktop, and web from a single codebase, Uno Platform is worth a close look.
SkiaSharp 4.0 Preview 1 is available now. We encourage Uno Platform developers to try the preview, test it against your applications, and share feedback — your input during the preview period directly shapes the final release. We will have much more to share at the June 30th event. We hope to see you there.
SkiaSharp is open source. Contributions, issues, and feedback are welcome at github.com/mono/SkiaSharp →
