News

Uno Platform Helps Ship First Stable SkiaSharp 4.0 Release for 2D .NET Graphics

• By David Ramel
• 06/30/2026

Microsoft's .NET team and Uno Platform have announced SkiaSharp 4.0, with SkiaSharp 4.148.0 now available as the first stable release in the v4 line for .NET developers building cross-platform 2D graphics into apps.

SkiaSharp is the .NET wrapper around Google's open-source Skia graphics engine, the same graphics layer that the Microsoft .NET Blog said supports pixel-perfect text, geometry and image rendering across mobile, desktop, Web and server scenarios.

"If you have been building .NET apps that need to render -- text, geometry, images, custom drawing surfaces -- you have almost certainly been building on SkiaSharp, whether you knew it or not," said Uno Platform yesterday. "SkiaSharp wraps the open-source Skia engine and sits underneath .NET MAUI, WinUI 3, WebAssembly targets, and frameworks like Uno Platform. It is the reason a .NET developer can write a single rendering path and have it behave faithfully on iOS, Android, Windows, macOS, Linux, and the web. Pixel-perfect text, hardware-accelerated geometry, consistent color output -- all of it flows through Skia."

Microsoft announced the stable release on June 29, while the SkiaSharp release notes list Version 4.148.0 as released June 22. The package is available on NuGet, and the release notes say it supersedes 4.147.0 while rolling up preview-only work that had not previously shipped as stable.

What SkiaSharp Is For
In practical terms, SkiaSharp is for drawing and rendering in .NET applications. It powers text, geometry and image rendering across mobile, desktop, Web and server using Skia, an open-source engine. Developers using SkiaSharp can write one rendering path and have it behave consistently on iOS, Android, Windows, macOS, Linux and the Web.

For application developers, key use cases include rendering text, drawing geometry, working with images, using custom drawing surfaces and enabling consistent visual output across multiple device and operating-system targets. The sources also connect SkiaSharp directly to framework-level UI rendering, including .NET MAUI, WinUI 3, WebAssembly targets and Uno Platform.

What Is New in Version 4
The core technical change is the engine update. The release upgrades the native Skia engine to Chrome milestone m148. Microsoft described the result as a current native Skia engine with upstream rendering, codec, performance and security work flowing into apps without code changes.

Several API and feature additions include full variable font support in SkiaSharp and HarfBuzzSharp, color font palette support for emoji and color fonts, animated WebP encoding through SKWebpEncoder, and zero-copy stream-to-SKData conversion through SKStream.GetData(). HarfBuzz 14.2.0 ships alongside SkiaSharp 4.148.0.

SkiaSharp 4.148.0 also completes v4 API surface cleanup. Legacy members deprecated in v3 are now compile errors, obsolete enum members are trimmed from the reference assembly, and older font-on-paint APIs deprecated in favor of SKFont now produce compile errors. The release notes also list remaining legacy paint state-reading APIs on SKPaint as obsolete.

Bug Fixes and Platform Work
The release notes list fixes for SKPixmap and SKBitmap.GetPixelSpan stride handling, SKPixmap.GetPixelSpan<T>(x, y) coordinate offset handling, an SKPath finalizer crash, default-typeface resolution and a WinUI Projection DLL issue affecting .NET 9 projects. They also list a fix for Android SKGLView rendering after a MAUI tab switch.

Platform updates include Linux Bionic native assets, Tizen x64 and ARM64 native builds, fixed Apple target framework monikers for libraries and apps, C# 13 support on legacy target framework monikers through PolySharp, and removal of pre-.NET 8 Emscripten builds for WebAssembly.

The release also updates several bundled native dependencies. The release notes list updates for libexpat, HarfBuzz, libjpeg-turbo, freetype, zlib and libpng. Microsoft's announcement says every bundled native dependency was updated with the latest security fixes.

Performance Claims in the Sources
Microsoft said initial testing on the hardware-accelerated GPU backend showed rendering up to 24 percent faster on v4 than on the previous stable release for UI work such as elevated cards, drop shadows and layered surfaces. The same post said a dashboard of shadowed cards increased from 65 FPS to 80 FPS and a scrolling activity feed increased from 47 FPS to 58 FPS when comparing SkiaSharp 3.119 against v4 over OpenGL.

Microsoft also said procedural Perlin-noise shaders run about six times faster on the CPU. Uno's announcement repeated the 24 percent figure and added that, for Uno Platform apps specifically, it is seeing rendering improvements of up to 30 percent in initial testing. The Microsoft post noted that its testing was on Windows 11 and .NET 10 over OpenGL, and that absolute frame rates vary by GPU and driver.

Microsoft and Uno Co-Maintenance
The most notable project-governance point is the co-maintenance relationship between Microsoft's .NET team and Uno Platform. Microsoft's announcement says SkiaSharp 4 is the result of the .NET team and Uno Platform building it together, and says Uno builds its rendering pipeline on SkiaSharp, making it one of the most active and invested contributors to the project.

Uno's announcement says Uno Platform is a co-maintainer of SkiaSharp alongside the .NET team at Microsoft. It frames that role as an outcome of a broader technology collaboration between Uno Platform and Microsoft's .NET team, with SkiaSharp described as the area where that collaboration is most directly visible to Uno users and the wider .NET ecosystem.

According to Microsoft, Uno engineers contributed engine upgrades, the full variable font implementation, object-lifecycle and crash fixes, cross-platform binding generator tooling, the interactive WebAssembly gallery and the upcoming Graphite backend. Microsoft named Ramez Gerges, Elie Bariche and Sasha Krsmanovic in its thanks to Uno.

The Uno Platform announcement says co-maintenance gives its engineering team a direct, ongoing role in SkiaSharp development and release work. It says that has practical consequences for issues affecting Uno Platform users, including rendering behavior on WebAssembly, performance regressions and API gaps relevant to cross-platform .NET development.

Open Source and Release Cadence
The open-source aspect is explicit in the source material. Microsoft says SkiaSharp uses the open-source Skia engine. Uno says SkiaSharp is open source and that contributions, issues and feedback are welcome at the mono/SkiaSharp GitHub repository. The release notes also list community contributors, including @ramezgerges, @4Darmygeometry, @SimonvBez, @ebariche and @Copilot.

Going forward, Microsoft says SkiaSharp will ship on a regular cadence in two channels aligned with upstream Skia milestones. The stable channel corresponds to Skia milestones in Chrome's Stable and Extended Stable channels, while the preview channel corresponds to the milestone in Chrome's Beta channel.

Microsoft also said SkiaSharp 4.150.0 Preview 2 is available on NuGet now, with Graphite, Skia's next-generation GPU backend, as its headline. Uno's announcement says Uno Platform ships with SkiaSharp 3.x by default, and that developers can experimentally try SkiaSharp 4.0 in Uno.Sdk-based applications by setting the SkiaSharpVersion MSBuild property to 4.148.0.

Where to Get It
Developers can get SkiaSharp 4.148.0 on NuGet, read the release notes, use the new SkiaSharp website and interactive gallery, and try SkiaFiddle, an interactive playground linked from the gallery. The Microsoft and Uno announcements also promoted a SkiaSharp live event on June 30 covering what is new in SkiaSharp 4.0, the co-maintenance model and what is ahead for SkiaSharp in the .NET ecosystem.