[1] Skia Inc. originally developed the library; Google acquired it in 2005,[2] and then released the software as open source licensed under the New BSD free software license in 2008.

In order to stay multi-platform, Skia supports several (platform-dependent) back-ends.

These include: Skia is most similar in purpose to Cairo or Pathfinder (meaning that it focuses on drawing) rather than to other more elaborate APIs like that of Qt that provide their own widgets and UI description language etc.

[4] The library is used as of 2023[update] in Google Chrome, ChromeOS, ChromiumOS, Mozilla Firefox, Mozilla Thunderbird, Android, Firefox OS, Flutter,[5] Avalonia (from Alpha 4), LibreOffice (from version 7.0) and RAD Studio[6](since version 12.0).

Skia Inc, developers of the Skia Graphics Engine, was founded in 2004 by Mike Reed and Cary Clark in Chapel Hill North Carolina, before being acquired by Google in 2005.