Easy Custom Navigation with Flagstone UI | Community Feed

This post is Matt’s contribution to MAUI UI July 2026 and also marks Flagstone UI’s graduation from experimental to generally available. The headline addition is FsShell — a subclassed, drop-in replacement for Shell that solves a long-standing .NET MAUI constraint: you’ve never been able to take Shell’s routing without also taking Shell’s default UI chrome.

That changes with FsShell. You swap the base class, and Shell’s navigation logic stays intact. What you present on screen is entirely up to you.

What you’ll learn

Why stock Shell couples navigation and presentation — and why that limits what you can build
Swapping AppShell : Shell for AppShell : FsShell with no other changes, immediately unlocking ItemTemplate support for tabs
Using VisualStateManager with FsShell’s custom Selected/Unselected states to drive tab styling and animations
Building a custom tab bar with an action button (centre camera icon with notification badge), all in standard cross-platform .NET MAUI
Replacing the tab bar entirely with a media player and expandable vertical nav menu — Shell’s routing remains untouched throughout
Why Flagstone UI is analogous to Tailwind: a styling surface that gives you more control, not a pre-built component library

The post walks through three sample apps of increasing complexity — a better default tab bar, an action-button pattern, and a media-player-at-the-bottom nav. Full source code is available in the Flagstone UI repo.

dotnet add package FlagstoneUI.Core --version 2.0.4