Can I use Unity to build a simple business app?

Questions & Answers
1

Brand new here…

I am trying to create a simple app with essentially 4 clickable buttons.

  1. a link to the main website
  2. a PDF file
  3. personnel bio’s
  4. contributors

Its quite basic really, with perhaps the exception of an embedded PDF. I suppose my REAL question is, am I barking up the wrong tree here, using Unity to create this? Or is this completely possible using Unity. I’ll buy PDF Renderer if necessary. I’d ask more but I really don’t want to take up anyone’s time.

Thanks for any feedback.

2

Yes it’s possible, but it would be a terrible choice. Unity is a game engine; it has inbuilt features for things like pathfinding, global illumination, skinned mesh rendering, terrain generation, physics simulation…
your app would include all those features but use none of them. And you’d have to write additional code to display a PDF since that’s s task not designed for a game engine.

3

If you business application involves 3D visualization or simulation. Then yes, Unity would be appropriate.

4

I would argue unity would be a great choice, in theory, for some business software applications.

  • cross platform support for UWP, Mac OS, iOS, Android etc. Build once, deploy many.
  • understandable by a lot of students in engineering / game design / designer work, ie theres people you can hire.
  • If you are a consulting/custom software (sales tools) business your application UI designers can get your product halfway there, instead of handing developers a AI mock… So the time to deliverable work is significantly shortened compared to native app development.
  • It allows you to add more visual elements you cant do easily in UWP xaml for example.
  • I think the reactive design controls are far superior compared to Android and UWP xaml. On par with iOS nibs…
  • also I would argue that if a feature isn’t being used I’m pretty sure unity is smart enough to turn it off.
5

I would argue it’s way overkill and you can use Visual studio’s to make a C# WPF project to achieve the exact same thing. As a bonus, by default it graphically looks like a windows business application. You can get going just by downloading Visual Studio and creating a new project. I’m a student and have used both. There’s less to learn to get a good business application running in WPF but there are less video resources. Microsoft’s MDSN documentation is very extensive though.