I just migrated a bigger project to Unity 6 and was stunned by the depreciation of the Social API. I use it pretty heavy for abstraction of 5 different platforms (Android, iOS and Windows, MacOS & Linux on Steam), and it worked pretty well so far. It’s also highly interwoven throughout my code, so having to let it go would be a huge additional invest now (presuming that there will be proper “standalone” replacements by the platforms themselves at all – so far at least what I use all implements the Social platform for consumption…).
Can I at least safely assume that the Social API will be still available throughout the Unity 6 lifetime? At least that would be my expectation for an LTS stack…
Thanks, habitoti
Same, is it being replaced by something? Or what are we supposed to use?
Long time since Social API flag as ‘Social is deprecated and will be removed in a future release.’
Any news ? Maybe from Unity staff ?
The Socials API obviously didn’t pan out for Unity, as they never added another backend besides the initial one for Apple Game Center. Not seeing any movement on adding new backends for almost a decade, it was clear the API would be retired at some point.
I doubt Unity will provide anything like in the future. They’ve been trying to cut costs and use their weight to get platform owners to provide these implementations themselves (see also the wrestling around getting Microsoft to take over the VSCode integration).
Your best bet is to use Apple’s official Unity plugin instead (or write your own):
Unity anyway didn’t deliver any implementations of the API – it’s just a set of interfaces. And as such it serves a good purpose of unifying access to player information and dealing with native UIs for leaderboards etc.
I am using Apple GameCenter, Google Playstore and Steam implementations, and it just works and does all I need. If they deprecate it to indicate that they won’t further enhance it…ok. I just hope they leave it in the code as-is.
Just updated to Unity 6, and it doesn’t work anymore: the button I have to display leaderboards simply doesn’t do anything now.
I only use the social api to display GPG leaderboards. Isn’t there a workaround for this?
Just ridiculous.