What is react-native-skia?

@shopify/react-native-skia brings the Skia graphics engine (used by Flutter and Chrome) to React Native, enabling high-performance 2D graphics, custom shaders, and complex visual effects directly in React Native. Why Skia? Native drawing APIs (Canvas on Android, Core Graphics on iOS) are different and complex. Skia provides a unified, powerful 2D graphics API that runs on the UI thread via JSI — rendering at 60fps without touching the JS thread. Basic Skia drawing: import { Canvas, Circle, Group, LinearGradient, Path, Rect, Text, useFont } from "@shopify/react-native-skia"; function SkiaDemo() { return ( <Canvas style={{ flex: 1 }}> <Rect x={0} y={0} width={256} height={256}> <LinearGradient start={{ x: 0, y: 0 }} end={{ x: 256, y: 256 }} colors={["#00ff00", "#0000ff"]} /> </Rect> <Circle cx={128} cy={128} r={64} color="red" opacity={0.8} /> </Canvas> ); }. Animations with Skia: Skia values integrate with react-native-reanimated — animations drive Skia drawing on the UI thread: const progress = useSharedValue(0); // Drive animation from gestures or timing const cx = useDerivedValue(() => 128 + 64 * Math.cos(progress.value * 2 * Math.PI)); <Circle cx={cx} cy={cy} r={10} color="white" />. Shader (fragment shader) support: GLSL/SkSL shaders for complex visual effects — gradients, blur, displacement maps, procedural textures. Image filters: blur, color matrix, drop shadow — applied to any Skia content. Used by: Shopify (their design team built it), complex data visualizations, games, creative apps, photo editors in React Native.