I come to you for getting a fairly critical opinion in the future of a society.
Indeed, we are a young french start-ups wishing to launch a “social” smartphone application that will be available for iOS and Android. So far all is well!
Nevertheless, we started working with an external service provider that had been recommended to us. It is very good at developing games in hand, when we established our request, it is related to a “native” application. It therefore confirmed that it was in his skills.
During the first glimpses we were disappointed but especially worried because it took time and the graphic quality was, of course, not native (even if there is a designated within our team this was not possible). We asked him to send us the Unity project to verify this in order to draw the right conclusion. And indeed … it was necessary to manually set the sensitivity of the scroll, the touch screen, etc … We also understood that it would be possible to get the record that we wanted (graphically) because each button is an image and above all it is very difficult to make good qualities even “truecolor” .We therefore wondered whether “Unity 3D” was adapted to the creation of similar smartphone application Instagram, facebook etc …
We are now in a bind because we have already spent quite a substantial sum for Features (IM, geoloc etc …). At the moment we have paused the dev app to find a solution. In any case we do not doubt the quality of Unity 3D (which is very powerful). We really wonder whether it is suitable to our request …
Do we have a solution? Can we develop natively on Unity 3D?
No, its not a good idea to use Unity for native apps. Faking native iOS controls is something that Apple hates (apps get sometimes rejected). Also doing an mobile app similar to those listed with Unity is kinda silly as you lose time doing things you would need to with normal dev tools (xcode, android studio, xamarin, etc.) Your app would also start a lot slower than normal apps do, eat battery a lot more and so on…
Very well. This is what we intend to do next . Unfortunately we lost time and money because the Unity code is not recoverable . We will therefore focus on a combined site with a webapp . We have no choice …
We would have liked avoided this decision as well as we would have to be informed by our supplier .
Very well. Thank you for all the details. We were far from imagining all that … our provider we never informed and thus therefore we have to orient ourselves on creating a website and a webapp .
We have already lost $ 10,000 since the code is unrecoverable or at least , we can not do anything .
I’ve been playing around with Appcelerator’s Titanium quite a lot lately. Basically you write your app in JS and it then compiles for the necessary platforms (WebViews are also possible). It’s free with a paid Enterprise services tier.
If you do decide to try Titanium, get Genymotion (better emulator for Android, not free for commercial use though) and TiShadow (which is free and makes iterating MUCH faster by pushing up changes as you save them, no need to recompile).
Is it heavy UI oriented? If your focus is on the UI, and not so much on 2D or 3D art, then Unity may not be your best choice. If the flip is true, then Unity can be a fast cross-platform development solution for both games and non-games. I develop both.
What’s wrong with plain old xcode and swift? Native app development cannot be any easier. Plus if you needed to port to Android there are a few libraries/tools that can help you with that.
It can be used for plenty of non-game mobile applications, but it’s designed and optimised for real-time applications rather than GUI-driven ones. Real-time apps are running all the time even when there’s no user input, which means they’re updating, rendering and otherwise chewing up resources and battery power. GUI-driven apps only respond when something changes and/or there’s user input, so it can idle a lot of the time and conserve resources and battery power.
It’s a shame there’s no Unity-equivalent for cross-platform GUI-driven applications.
You can basically do the same things as with native development but with one codebase (of course there’s things different platforms handle differently, so you also have to handle them, that’s sometimes the case with Unity too, though).
I guess I don’t really get what you mean by general purpose here.
I tested in Samsung Galaxy S3 (old smartphone) with the new UI and then I simulate the common behavior (transitions, scrolls lists, with perspective camera for using Z) and the app works perfect and responsive, does not overheat and not consume more battery than open a mobile browser like chrome.
I think for common apps and multi platform it’s very useful.
Edit: Please change the title to the post? its too broad and one of those “HELP, read my post because it says…HELP” I just happen to click on it when i was trying to read a different post. lol
I thought I would weigh in on this post. I cannot really vote on the above poll as I plan on using UNITY for growing “plants”, 100% smart phone controlled , with the arduino circuit board USING unity as the interface for buttons, either GUI or simple GameObjects (as buttons and display). It (the board) can control valves, one wire temp sensors, light switching etc. and yes, i have some prototype code to do such with unity, however obviously UNITY is mainly used/intended for game writing… google the board with unity3d keywords, there are others using unity to control the board for other purposes (game controllers, hardware interfacing) using c# as that is the native (?) language of the board.
Thanks
King
So yes, unity CAN be used for other things,other then games, but Ideally I’m not sure? It was very easy to use the above mentioned hardware board WITH unity for anything other then games.
Imagine for a minute that you took unity and made and open source hand held console (or an old rooted android with the base OS on it?) that was dedicated to JUST using unity? Yes, I just re-invented the gameboy with better gfx. lol
I just happen to click on it when i was trying to read a different post. lol