A Significant Sponsorship to Drive Our Open-Source Roadmap! #19108
Replies: 29 comments 28 replies
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Congratulations! |
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great |
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Amazing news. Avalonia's mobile development needs a huge boost. |
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IIRC most of that should already work via MAUI/Xamarin essentials? MAUI essentials is officially supported with Avalonia. |
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Amazing news. Congratulations 👏 |
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NB |
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NB |
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NB... NB like 牛逼 ??? |
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NB! |
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Great news 👏 |
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NB |
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I'd like to see more tutorials and step by step guides on how to build, debug and deploy mobile apps, especially on android, using vs2022. I cannot find such tutorials online. |
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Some ideas for what to do with the money:
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Wayland support becomes more and more required as time passes by, especially on mobile platforms |
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What do you mean mobile? Neither android or iOS use Wayland at all. There are mobile OSes that can use it (EG PostmarketOS) but they are very obscure/niche. |
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A lot of mobile Linux versions use Wayland - SteamOS, which is getting a lot of traction now, for example We had to completely drop Avalonia for these requests and export our key logic into DLL, compile it as NAOT for target OS and import as native DLL in different framework and build different UI in the end. Thankfully UI they requested was modest these times, but this really worries us in the future |
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It does, but I am not sure I would count it as a mobile OS. It's really just standard Arch with some patches and a read only file system. You can even quit the Steam interface to load up standard KDE for the Desktop. Also, X11 generally works fine in Wayland via XWayland. I am not sure why a complete lack of Wayland would be a blocker unless they refuse to include XWayland (which SteamOS certainly has). Native Wayland is a nice thing to have, which is why I mentioned it. But it's always been a low priority because XWayland generally works "good enough". |
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I don't insist Wayland support being a high priority feature :) |
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NB |
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Congratulations Team, That's a great news. As Mike highlighted, Getting started with AvaloniaUI is a real pain for devs with no prior WPF/Xamarim experience. My priorities would be to focus on,
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I cant help built feel it its to reliant on Microsoft's road map allot of tooling has tried all this before and failed. Because of some bug they cannot over come due to the lack of tooling or problems with the underlaying system. |
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This is great news and I'd love to see more of this in the ecosystem Congratulations 🎊 |
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My sujestion of an roadmap 1 - add avalonia labs controls to core 2 - add winui controls like teachingtip and ink controls 3 - add avalonia acelerate to core (browser and mediaplayer) 4 - make avalonia essentials that was abandoned great again (including desktop) 5 - add levitalli compiledbindings (x:bind) to avalonia 6 - add drawer or sidebar controls 7 - add camera control 8 - add barcode/qrcode Reader/viewer control |
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FYI, you have been quoted in the news |
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Congratulations 🎊 This comes at a very interesting time. Avalonia is largely at feature parity with WPF -- saying nothing of cross-platform support and what it does better. There are only a few minor features yet to do on that front. Recently the Avalonia team has been hard at work on Accelerate. That does a few interesting things: 1. lots of dogfooding the framework itself. 2. A focus on tooling elevates the whole ecosystem. I always expected once Accelerate was out of the gate the team would refocus on the framework taking Avalonia well above what existing XAML frameworks can do. When you are at feature parity and have amazing tooling in place where else is there to go? With such a significant boost in funding its going to be really interesting to see where the team can go from here. It's a massive tailwind. |
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Excellent news, it's well deserved. My own perspective which I believe will drive more usage of Avalonia are 1/ Improved themes - easier theming and ability to share themes with each other. Eg see imgui Post your color styles/themes here 2/ DataGrid - it's a control which is rarely implemented well and optimized for both fast live update and/or millions of records. Many of the best libs are now paid for but restricted to web frameworks only. See this abandoned link for a ton of useful info Modern WinUI DataGrid - Input Needed |
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What I urgently need are: |
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I'm really excited to see how Avalonia will be able to grow with such a boost. Thanks Devolutions! |
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This is great news! Congratulations! |
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Also dont forget rider users... |
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Rider already has incredible XAML support. |
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But rider users are negligenciated because acelerate things are only for vs |
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The only VS exclusive feature is the VS extension. Everything else works with Rider. |
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Yes, and i am talking about the features in the vs extension. |
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Congrats on your sponsorship, well done.
my priorities are:
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.NET 10 is going to support NativeAOT for Android out of the box. We will support it likely with .NET 10 RC, without any forks unlikely previous bionic experiments. 12.0 branch (master) on itself also got several performance improvements on Avalonia.Android side already too (#18973, #18974, #18975, #19045, #18997). And #18646 is a great one too, not yet merged. |
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Well deserved, congrats |
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Amazing news! Congratulations! |
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Congratulations to the team! This is so well deserved. |
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Congratulations!!!! |
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I realize this is just another "yay" on top of many other "congratulations", but I'm just really happy for you all. May Avalonia continue to succeed! おめでとうございます！ |
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Congratulations!
Thank you for the great product. |
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For point 5, have you seen the Control Catalog? https://github.com/AvaloniaUI/ControlCatalogStandalone |
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Wow, I did not know about the Control Catalog! Thank you very much! I'll definitely check that out. But, still, it should go to MS store! It's free! Also, I just found "Playground" only a few hours ago and it helped me as well. |
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There is also the samples repo. Which a lot of people miss, despite it being the only location for some of the documentation. |
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Yes, and I think those samples and Control Catalog should get together and go to MS Store as one standalone app for newbies like me to show off what Avalonia UI can do! |
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FYI for the latest version of ControlCatalog, you need to clone the Avalonia repo, init submodules, and build the project. There's also a render demo sample that contains some useful stuff. Keeping these in-repo help prevent breaks where the testing suite isn't very good. |
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amazing news. Congratulations ! |
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These are great news indeed! I'm very glad for Avalonia! A big thanks to Devolutions! I'm a newcomer to Avalonia, and an experienced WPF developer. I was looking for a really good .NET UI framework, that was graphically powerful, and read about Avalonia. I've heard about Avalonia before, and knew it was XAML based, but I didn't pay enough attention. But, recently, I was seriously looking for a UI framework, and tried a few. I tried Open Silver — a great project too, but didn't fit my needs, because it renders everything in HTML/CSS. Then, I tried Avalonia, and I fell in love with it. Its WASM approach is great, and is one of the things the threw me in! One of my concerns, though, was that an open source project this big requires a huge development effort, and thus needs considerable funding to survive. Reading these news today is a big boost! Congratulations! You deserve it! Since you asked for us to share what we want more on Avalonia, here are a few things that are important to me:
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I would like support for basic logic and math in selectors, too, but the team is not keen on creating tooling for that. Maybe someday binding to static functions will be implemented and that will be enough to ignore the tooling since you can debug those on the C# side. If you're not reflection-averse, SukiUI has a really interesting experimental Shaders are possible through SKShader which uses Skia's SkSL language. There's some usage of it in this repository as well as SukiUI. |
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We used to have Pixels Shaders in WPF 20 years ago. Still not there anywhere else. |
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You would just use https://github.com/Sergio0694/ComputeSharp anywhere else if you were a Windows-only app. |
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The problem with PixelShaders is that SkiaSharp only supports SKRuntimeEffect for hw-accelerated rendering mode. And even then it sometimes segfaults. It's something that we are looking to implement at some point though. |
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See levitalli compiled bindings , i can be ported to avalonia and will add all x:bind capabilities like binding c# functions |
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Discussed here #12332 |
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We've got some genuinely exciting news to share with the Avalonia community today! We're thrilled to announce that Avalonia has secured a substantial three-year sponsorship. This sponsorship will allow us to accelerate Avalonia's development and benefit everyone significantly.
The sponsor is Devolutions, a Québec-based leader in remote connection management—including RDP and SSH—and Privileged Access Management (PAM), whose cross-platform solutions are built with Avalonia. Their US $3 million commitment provides predictable funding exclusively for community benefit. To put this in perspective, our GitHub sponsors have contributed €15,418 over the past three years, and we're incredibly grateful for that community support, but this single sponsorship from Devolutions dwarfs that by a factor of nearly 200.
David Hervieux, CEO of Devolutions, explains their motivation:
We extend our sincere thanks to Devolutions for this significant commitment.
What This Means for You – The Community
This funding enables sustained focus on the core framework, documentation, tooling, and community support. All of this remains freely available, meaning every Avalonia user benefits at no cost. Crucially, the sponsorship agreement preserves Avalonia's autonomy and contractually binds us to the MIT licence. Given recent license changes by other projects, we understand why commitments alone may seem insufficient, but abandoning the MIT licence would terminate the sponsorship agreement.
For a long time, we've faced the classic open-source funding gap. While our revenue-generating services have kept us profitable and enabled us to grow the business to a team of 13, commercial work has dictated the team's priorities. This sponsorship completely removes that conflict, allowing us to deliver our roadmap more quickly and benefit every developer who builds with Avalonia. We've always invested heavily in open-source software. Still, it required a constant balancing act between generating enough revenue from commercial activities and not neglecting the foundation on which our entire business is built.
Sustainable Growth for a Lasting Impact
Building Avalonia has always been about creating something truly valuable and enduring. What started as a personal experiment over a decade ago has grown into an enterprise-ready UI framework, but the fundamental challenge remains the same: how do you sustain critical technology that an entire ecosystem depends on?
The conventional answer is venture capital, and we've certainly had offers. However, the statistics tell a sobering story that most people never consider. Around 90% of all startups fail, and even among those that secure VC funding, only 40% are still active after 5 years. The remaining 60% have either failed completely or been acquired, often in fire sales that prioritise investor returns over product continuity.
It's not just bad luck; it's the inevitable result of a fundamental misalignment. VC funding demands exponential growth and exits within a short time frame (typically 3 to 4 years), while the technologies that underpin entire industries need to exist for decades.
Compare this to bootstrapped companies, where 60-70% survive the 5-year mark precisely because they optimise for sustainability from day one. We're living proof of this approach, halfway through our fifth year of trading, and we're profitable with double-digit revenue growth year-over-year, including 69% growth in the first half of 2025 alone. That's the difference between building a business to last versus building one designed to be sold.
This sponsorship demonstrates a more effective approach for open-source projects. When the companies that depend on Avalonia support its sustainability, everyone wins. You get a more reliable, faster-improving framework, and we get the resources to focus on making Avalonia better. We hope more organisations will follow Devolutions' lead in supporting the open-source projects their businesses depend on. If this becomes the norm, the entire .NET ecosystem will benefit from more stable, better-funded projects.
What's Next?
We've been hard at work on planning and initial development of Avalonia v12, which remains on track for Q4 this year, aligning our release cadence with .NET. Among other improvements, v12 includes a significant investment in documentation and developer onboarding materials. We've heard loud and clear that getting started with Avalonia is difficult for developers without extensive WPF experience, and we're committed to fixing this.
To deliver our ambitious roadmap, we're building the strongest team possible, attracting former Xamarin and Microsoft employees who recognise what we've built and want to help us cement Avalonia's leading position in cross-platform .NET UI.
Get Involved
This sponsorship gives us incredible flexibility to focus on what matters most to you. Use this GitHub discussion to share your priorities and suggest features that would make the biggest difference to your projects. Your input will directly shape how we allocate this funding.
Your continued use and advocacy for Avalonia drives our growth, and we're now at over 87 million NuGet downloads and counting. But what we need is your voice in steering Avalonia towards the improvements that matter most to you.
A Bright Future Ahead
Avalonia is truly entering its next chapter with stable backing, a strong commitment to open-source, and a clear vision to become the leading UI framework for .NET.
Thank you all for your ongoing support and belief in Avalonia. We're exceptionally optimistic about what we can achieve together!
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