MAUI is shaping up to be the star of the .NET 10 wave, and now it’s getting Material 3 (You) support for Android apps.
“Starting with .NET MAUI 10, you can opt your Android app into Material 3 (a.k.a. Material You) styling with a single MSBuild property,” Microsoft senior software engineer Gerald Versluis writes. “Material 3 is already live in a large set of controls today, more are on the way in upcoming service releases, and the plan is for it to become the default for Android in a future version.”
As Versluis explains, Material 3 (also called Material You) is the latest version of Google’s user interface design system. It provides dynamic color schemes tied to user preferences and the system theme, refreshed control shapes, elevations, and focus states, and more flexible customization capabilities than its predecessor. To date, developers creating Android apps with MAUI have used Material Design 2 styling, but if you enable Material 3 support, those apps will instantly look more modern and up-to-date.
To get there, you just need to update your app projects to .NET 10, which will ship this coming November, and add a few lines of XAML code to their project properties (.csproj) files:
<PropertyGroup>
<UseMaterial3>true</UseMaterial3>
</PropertyGroup>
(This is similar to how WPF developers add support for WinUI styling in .NET 9 and newer.)
Microsoft offers a simple Material 3-styled app for MAUI developers who want to take a look. It supports dark and light themes and you can see the updated styling on its SearchBar, Entry, DatePicker, Picker, Slider, ProgressBar, RadioButton, CheckBox, Switch, Button, and ImageButton controls. Microsoft is also updating its .NET MAUI documentation for Material 3.
Going forward, Microsoft will support Material 3 in more controls, and it’s examining whether it’s feasible to implement Material 3 on a per-control basis. It plans to make Material 3 the default in MAUI apps after all the remaining issues are resolved.
“Material 3 support in .NET MAUI 10 is one of those rare wins where you flip a single property and your Android app immediately looks more at home on the platform,” Versluis concludes. “Go enable it, file the issues you find, and let’s make .NET MAUI on Android feel as fresh as the platform underneath it.”