Blender developers have announced the release of Blender 2.8 in July 2019. Prior to this deadline, the team will work on completing the functionality and finalizing the user interface, while updating the user manual and correcting the identified bugs.

At the Homestretch workshop, an official schedule of work and release date was agreed upon:

• Mid-May: Finish work on the remaining features and improve UI from the task list. These are relatively simple changes in design and additions for new functionality.
• First week of June: developers update the user's guide in their respective fields.
• Mid-June: fix all high priority bugs. Other errors will also be fixed as much as possible, but not before those considered to be the most critical.
• July: release 2.80

The core development team will focus entirely on priority work on version 2.80 in the coming months. Patches will have to wait. Blender calls on developers working on new features to polish them to perfection so that they can be included in the release.

After the release of version 2.80, Blender promises to follow a fixed schedule. This means that 2.81 will be released in 3 months. There are many excellent patches under development and almost ready for inclusion in a new release (for example, UDIM), but this will greatly delay the release of 2.80.

Image: www.blender.org