SkiaSharp has been the backbone of cross-platform 2D graphics in .NET for over a decade. It powers pixel-perfect text,geometry, and image rendering across mobile, desktop, web, and server using theopen-source Skia engine, and it sits under .NET MAUI, WebAssembly, WinUI 3, andframeworks like Uno Platform. A few months ago we shipped SkiaSharp 4.0 Preview 1. Today we aretaking the next big step.SkiaSharp 4.148.0 is now available. This is the first stable release of SkiaSharp v4.Get SkiaSharp 4.148.0 on NuGetRead the full SkiaSharp 4.148.0 release notes for everydetail, and explore the new SkiaSharp website and interactive gallery.It rolls up all of the v4 preview work into one stable package you can ship with confidence. If you have been waitingfor v4 to settle before upgrading, this is the release to move to. And to celebrate, the .NET Foundation and UnoPlatform are hosting a half-day SkiaSharp event focused on what is new, what is improved, and how to get the most out ofv4.What is in itA better engine, for free. The native Skia engine is current through milestone m148: years of upstream rendering,codec, performance, and security work that benefits every app automatically, with no code changes. Sharper downscaledimages, automatic photo orientation, more accurate colors, and broad performance gains all come along for the ride.New capabilities. Full OpenType variable font axis control across SkiaSharp and HarfBuzzSharp, color font palettesfor emoji and icon fonts, and animated WebP encoding with SKWebpEncoder.A cleaner, more correct API. v4 completes a long migration: legacy APIs are retired and the surface is clean.Underneath, the object lifecycle was reworked so native singletons are properly reference counted, quietly fixing awhole class of use-after-free crashes that could occur when the garbage collector finalized managed wrappers duringin-flight native calls. The kind of fix you never see, which is the point.Modernized underneath. The test suite moved to xUnit v3, builds run on reproducible Docker images, device andWebAssembly testing runs through DeviceRunners, and every bundled native dependency was updated with the latest securityfixes.Both animations were drawn and encoded with SkiaSharp 4.148.0 itself: variable-font axes and color-font palettesrendered to frames, then written as animated WebP.See the source.Faster where it countsA newer engine should not just do more, it should do it faster. In our initial testing on the hardware-accelerated GPUbackend, the work that dominates modern app UIs (elevated cards, drop shadows, and layered surfaces) renders up to 24%faster on v4 than on the previous stable release, with no regressions anywhere else.Comparing the last stable release (3.119) against v4 over OpenGL, a busy dashboard of shadowed cards rose from 65 to 80FPS, and a scrolling activity feed from 47 to 58 FPS, both about 24% faster in our initial testing. Scenes that do notlean on shadows, like charts, text, and vector maps, were already efficient and carry over unchanged, so you get theupside with no downside. As a bonus, procedural Perlin-noise shaders run about 6 times faster on the CPU, a nice win forgenerative textures and effects.Initial testing on Windows 11 and .NET 10 over OpenGL. Absolute frame rates vary by GPU and driver.Built a little differentlySkiaSharp wraps an enormous Google C++ codebase, and a lot of the work that used to be manual toil is now driven byagentic workflows: syncing upstream Skia milestones, auditing for upstream CVEs, generating release notes and API diffs,and keeping the docs current. The point is not the automation for its own sake. It is that the human time now goes toAPI design and correctness, which is exactly where it should be, and it is a big part of how the project keeps pace withChrome’s release train.Keeping pace with Skia, togetherGoing forward, SkiaSharp has a stronger commitment to staying in lock step with upstream Skia milestones. This has beenone of the most consistent pieces of feedback from the community and from Microsoft internal teams: developers need amore predictable way to understand which SkiaSharp versions are current, how they map to Skia, and how fixes reach them.Thanks to the co-maintenance partnership between the .NET team and Uno Platform, SkiaSharp now ships on a regularcadence in two channels that follow upstream Skia milestones. The Stable channel corresponds to the Skia milestones inChrome’s Stable and Extended Stable channels, while the Preview channel corresponds to the milestone in Chrome’s Betachannel. If you build on SkiaSharp, you can plan around it with more confidence.The next preview is already here.SkiaSharp 4.150.0 Preview 2 is on NuGet now. Itsheadline is Graphite, the next-generation Skia GPU backend contributed by Uno Platform, alongside new image and colorfilter APIs, SkSL image filters, and more.Thank you, Uno PlatformSkiaSharp 4 is the result of the .NET team and Uno Platform building it together. Uno buildstheir rendering pipeline on SkiaSharp, which makes them one of the most active and invested contributors to the project,and it shows. Working alongside the .NET team, their engineers contributed major pieces of this release and the next:engine upgrades, the full variable font implementation, object-lifecycle and crash fixes, cross-platform bindinggenerator tooling that lowered the barrier for other contributors, the interactive WebAssembly gallery, and the upcomingGraphite backend.A faster-moving SkiaSharp makes Uno apps better, and a strong Uno community makes SkiaSharp better. Thank you to RamezGerges, Elie Bariche, Sasha Krsmanovic, and everyone at Uno. We are excited to keep building together. You can read moreabout how Uno Platform contributed to SkiaSharp 4 on their blog.Explore what is possible in the interactive SkiaSharp gallery, or try your own codelive in SkiaFiddle, powered by Uno Platform.Tune in: the SkiaSharp live eventTo celebrate the release, the .NET Foundation and Uno Platform are hosting a live event dedicated entirely to SkiaSharp,with members of the .NET team. We will walk through everything in this release, show it off live, and talk about what isahead, including the co-maintenance model and the road to Graphite.If you want the full story behind 4.0, this is where to get it. Date: June 30, 11am to 3pm ET Where to watch: Uno Platform on YouTube, X, and LinkedIn, and the .NET Foundation YouTube channel Event details: platform.uno/skiasharpCome for the demos, stay for the deep dives. We will see you there.SummarySkiaSharp 4.148.0 is the first stable release of SkiaSharp v4: a current Skia engine, variable fonts, color palettes,animated WebP, a cleaner and more correct API, and a predictable release cadence.Try it on NuGet, read therelease notes, give us feedback atgithub.com/mono/SkiaSharp, and join us at theSkiaSharp live event on June 30. Happy SkiaSharp-ing.The post SkiaSharp 4.0 is here: announcing the first stable release appeared first on .NET Blog.