Just read a thread about China’s localized Unity Hub here: Unity Users in China, You May Be The Victim Of A Secret "Chinese Version" of Unity Hub
In order to address people’s concerns about being “a victim of a secret Chinese version of Unity Hub”, I want to share the details of this localized Unity Hub for China users although it is not a secret at all for almost all the China developers in China since China Unity has already officially announced it back in May 2019 through China Unity’s official Wechat channel as well as other local medias, right after Unite Shanghai 2019. You can check out the announcement here: 账号已迁移 (in Chinese language).
As @AdamLiu pointed out correctly, when you download Unity Hub, China users will download the localized version of Unity Hub and anyone outside of China will download the “Global” version of Unity Hub. Of course, developers are free to install the “Global” version of Unity Hub which they can download from unity.com website if they are not on a China IP address.
However, the localized Chinese version of Unity Hub will not make you “a victim of a secret Chinese version of Unity Hub” since the differences between this localized version and the “Global” version can be summarized as follows:
1. Chinese version of Unity Hub has a “Community” tab where you can get all the latest technical articles, live sessions announcement and links to watch the recorded live sessions (live sessions are being delivered every two weeks by China Unity evangelism team) as well as Asset Store promotions. You can also check out when your Plus or Pro licenses are going to expire and links are available for extending the expired/soon to be expired subscriptions or upgrading to Plus or Pro from PE license directly through our online store.
(Screenshot captured at 16th of October 2019: China Unity team update the contents very frequently for our local developer communities)
2. On the “Install” tab where you can install Unity editors, China Unity team now provides a section called “Latest official releases (China)”. These builds are made by China Unity’s enterprise support team who directly supports our customers. These builds are based on the global LTS versions starting from 2017.4.32f1 and 2018.4.8f1 and on top of the global versions, we added and will continue to add features for local Chinese developers.
Notes:
(1) 2018.4.8c3 is based on 2018.4.8f1, same with 2017.4. Therefore, you can think of these builds like this:
2018.4.8c3 = 2018.4.8f1 + China features
2017.4.32c2 = 2017.4.32f1 + China features
(2) All the other released builds under “Latest official releases” and beta alpha sections are the same as the Global version of Unity Hub.
You may ask why these features not go directly to the global versions of Unity editor. The reason is these features were originally made for the local China market and they may not be suitable for global market. Of course, these features may eventually land on the global versions. But since the China market is evolving very rapidly and China developers want very short iteration time, creating a China Unity Editor (China Unity Editor = Global version + China features) will help to address this tight iteration time problem since it is maintained and go through the same global QA standards by the local China Unity team. You can check out the China Unity Editor announcement here: https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/Fpxga3s0nybomJGEYn9UrQ (in Chinese)
- If you are using Chinese version of Unity Hub, when downloading Unity editor installation files, you will get the files from local China CDN and you will get much faster download speed if you are living in China. Of course, if you live outside of China, global version of Unity Hub is recommended.
So as you can see, the Chinese version of Unity Hub is a localized version with rich community contents and local features made specifically for China developers in order to help them to learn Unity better to use Unity better.
Thanks for reading!