You never did and never will do.
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Just here for a mild necro to let anyone reading this know, and particularly Unity the company, that this is pretty clearly used solely for activity monitoring. As everyone has pointed out, it does nothing for the user to keep the hub open, and it goes against basic guidelines.
I want Unity to be aware that user support is a two way street. I would gladly share analytics and usage data with a company that respects their users. This is clearly not one of those companies, and I will be sure to take the same antagonistic approach to Unity’s data requests that they take towards my own use of my machine. As if the needless broken updates weren’t enough - seriously, who changes string names for vales that aren’t being used in any different way? It’s almost like there’s some kind of profit incentive for the support side of things.
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As long as steam did this I see no reason why this was a basic guideline when the app people used most still behave this way
“Steam does it so every program should be able to do it” is not a logical argument. There are reasons to have Steam running in the background, like using their messaging system. There is no reason for Unity Hub to be running in the background since it provides no background functionality outside gathering telemetry data for Unity. Giving users the option to close Unity Hub completely through the window is not a big ask.
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One reason is initialization of unity hub itself. Same reason as steam initialization time made it beneficial to stay in background
Another reason is it was communication from unity instance to unity hub. Such as syncing the user profile. If unity instance was installed from hub it have internal mechanism to ping the hub
And I am not saying every program should do. I just say it is baseline of what program can do and unity choose to do this way. Using argument like basic guideline is not valid when steam still do it
And IMHO I like it this way because I can go to tray and open any project faster if the hub just stay in the tray
We can still just close it via the tray. Given a lot of apps share this behaviour, my default process is to just open the tray and use that to close apps.
Yeah its a bit annoying it doesn’t close entirely from the window itself, though it’s not like we can’t close it at all.
I know 2 features of Unity Hub in tray.
- At least when you End Unity Editor process from Task Manager (lately it gets occasionally stuck Reloading Domain after Compilation) Unity Hub shows up and you can quickly reopen your project.
- You can quickly open another project from tray - we use it for Multiplayer testing in Editors using ParrelSync (can’t use Multiplayer Play Mode yet as it has a bug in our particular project)
That said I don’t know why the option of exiting on X wasn’t added yet. Looks like activity monitoring is really important to them.
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saying “steam” does it and comparing a game engine to a game store makes ZERO sense, steam needs it for messaging, friend list, friend req etc which is essential for its user and want it that way, discord does it too for the same reason.
unless you are saying unity hub is a social media platform? why are you comparing it to them? i assure you 98% of people are not thrill about receiving communication from unity nor they are syncing user profile 10 or 20 times a day, its a one time thing that they can do by manually opening it, for the renaming 2% (like you) you can just add a toggle that lets enable minimize to to tray option?
lets call it what it is, they want activity data, predatory practice by a engine which treats its users like a cattle.
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This is especially annoying on GNOME (Linux) because it has no traditional system tray by design. So I’d need to use the System Monitor to properly close it.
There are programs that behaves like this, including Steam. But every single one of them always provides an option to turn off this behavior. For example, you can pass STEAM_FRAME_FORCE_CLOSE to Steam to make it always close by default.
Unity Hub is the odd one out here.
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Hey everyone,
We just landed this feature in 3.15.3-beta.1. You can configure this behaviour from the settings panel
Users on Windows and Linux can now choose whether closing the Hub minimizes it to the system tray or fully quits. This setting is available in Settings > Appearance > Menu bar.
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There was no reason this should have taken this many years. Shame on your useless administration that allowed the most widely used game engine to lack such a basic feature for so long.
Thanks for implementing my suggestion!
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Ah yes, praise the holy Unity developers that—6 years after your suggestion—have finally managed to implement the groundbreaking feature of having a program terminate upon clicking the close button!
This shouldn’t have had to be suggested, this shouldn’t have had to be fixed, and it never should have taken 6 years. How insanely embarrassing. There’s no excuse for proprietary software that is worse than FOSS.
Additionally, calling the ability to terminate a program within the program instead of through a Task Manager is not a “feature” that should only be available in a beta!! It cannot be understated how absurd that is.
You could always just close it fully from the tray icon, same as tons of programs (like Steam for example). It’s nothing to be so dramatic about.
First, not everyone uses Windows. And it was never a huge inconvenience, but a telltale sign of Unity’s priorities when they intentionally leave the program open to collect data on you and intentionally design the close button to not close. That is the real problem.
Thank you for bringing this up, @Quack221, and for sharing your concerns about application behavior. We understand why continuous background processes can raise questions, and we appreciate the community’s vigilance.
To be perfectly clear: Unity Hub does not collect user data in the background or engage in any form of unauthorized surveillance. The process remaining active when clicking the close button was due to the default “Minimize to Tray” functionality, which is common in many launcher and Electron-based applications to facilitate faster access and updates.
A new team recently took ownership of the Hub, and our top priority has been addressing long-standing user feedback. We saw this thread, recognized the high demand for a simple exit option, and were happy to prioritise its implementation.
We value your feedback and are committed to ensuring the Unity Hub experience is both functional and transparent.
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Great to hear there’s a new team! The old one clearly was incompetent, as only an incompetent team would create an app lacking the basic ability to terminate itself via the app itself, no matter the type of app being a launcher. Regardless of the reasoning behind their decision, it never should have been that way. It only further eroded trust between the users and Unity.
So again I’m very glad to hear that!
I want to voice that I am not against option to do so but I would not agree if you changing default behaviour that it should minimize to tray for closing. Because it was totally more convenient
And I would still insist that for hub to be in the tray and less user will have a problem with it, hub itself should be more useful for it existence. Such as, as I always suggest, has the hub handle unity3d:// url scheme (like vscode handle vscode://)
As I have also list this