No, we need one level lower & zero mono. I want the sdk or runtime to be installed in the same way (and executable) the same way on android as on other linux distro's. .Net has ARM builds so it will work fine. This is without any specific framework dependencies (like aspnet, maui, avalonia etc) - just plain .net 8/10. It would actually be nice if android just bundled the runtime to begin with so we don't have to. They can just pin it to latest LTS versions and let it auto update now & then, same way as WebView/Google play services etc.
So for whatever reason you want the .NET runtime over Mono - not sure why that is a hard requirement, but AFAIK that is also the goal for microsoft. As in, merging those runtimes and have a single codebase that works for all platforms (including android). There are technical obstacles and historic codebases, but I would expect this unified runtime soon.
Cause since .Net Core 3 (first real production ready cross platformness) to .Net 10 (current LTS) is light years ahead of .Net Framework 4.8 / Mono (which is like half the performance of old .Net 4.8..). Not to be crude, but mono is pretty much trash. Should just be deprecated and the engine bro's should just stick to .Net LTS version (8 or 10, but 8 will be dead in a year). .Net 8/10 also has much better build tools, cleaner & smaller executables, better packaging tools to make deployments a breeze over the old system. The compiler is also much faster in general. You can tree-shake the hell out of your builds to get very lean artifacts. And then there is the garbage collector. And all of the low level optimizations in the CLR that just makes everything fast & less memory hungry.
Unity should really create a version of their engine on .Net 10, make the core as platform-agnostic as possible. It's fine if this variant is not backwards compatible. .Net 10 is also already on Xbox.
Its a pain though. We tried last year at work to build something a little bit more complex than their examples, and it was a pain. Gave up after a month and built our apps in Flutter instead. Works like a charm.
I’ve been building this way since 2018 using MvvmCross[0] and it's become much less painful with LLMs where you can simply ask to recreate an iOS UI on Android. I even managed to implement experimental hot reload[1] for native UIs on Android from .NET, but ended up not using it because, again, nowadays it's faster to iterate with Claude Code – it just one-shot things most of the time.
Currently I'm building an app with Uno Platform[2], which is basically .NET Flutter, and while it's cool to get things working across five different platforms at once, you can note the difference, especially on scroll. No automatic Liquid Glass / Material 3 for it either.
So it's a choose your poison situation: either building native interfaces on each platform separately, or fighting later with an additional layer of abstraction and a canvas-based UI wheel reinvention.
