@christophera_unity Thanks for the update. This has been plaguing our team for a month, so we’re looking forward to having it resolved.
A bit of feedback, if your team is open to it:
We only ever use Unity Hub to find a project by name in the list, and then click to open it. That’s the entire interaction, from start to finish. I’ve worked with many dev teams across multiple industries, and this has universally been the only use among all of my colleagues. Any modification to Hub that impedes this singular interaction should be treated as a critical defect and never ship.
For such a common and simple use case, it would be quite reasonable for a customer to expect a TTI of only a couple seconds. I’m confident that your team can achieve this if it’s given priority.
Amen brother. This is the ONLY reason Hub exists: to launch my projects in the correct version of Unity. That’s it, absolutely nothing else, full stop.
For all those new to the conversation, we used Unity for DECADES without Unity Hub.
For the power users with multiple Unity versions, we trivially did this by having labeled desktop shortcuts to the various versions of Unity we used, and we opened them, then selected the project we wanted and we were working in mere seconds.
Hub was supposed to make that better and has consistently now for nearly a decade made the daily experience of using Unity far more painful than it used to be, sucked the joy out of gamedev with every step and glitch and delay it introduces.
We didn’t even need to fiddle with the mouse on some of the later versions of the legacy in-engine project picker: you could just cursor up/down and press ENTER to launch. Why was that not in version 0.1 of hub?
I love this engine but not the hub.
Please Unity, let me love the hub, or at least not dread using it!!
PS: I supplied these suggestions on at least a dozen or more separate “How satisfied are you with the hub?” survey replies. I finally gave up even trying to respond to those. Go look in your backlog of those surveys if you disbelieve me. ALL of these ideas are there under my name.
So, I just uninstalled unity hub and tried to launch unity without it. It just asks me where the project is and Its pre-selecting the last project I have opened. This is amazing. I dont think I will be installing unity hub soon.
Please delete all the “features” you have added to the hub and just leave it there. There is literally thousands of breaking bugs all over unity, just fix those instead.
To clarify: 3.18 did. 3.19 in our testing handles 5, 10, 100 projects roughly the same. Some well-intentioned changes were causing bottlenecking issues and holding up the main thread. Basically we were playing things too safe to prevent errors and mistakes. In 3.19 we’ve relaxed that stance and will show the cached state of the projects/editors.
Check your DNS settings. In my case, the domain api.lab.amplitude.com was failing to resolve. Turns out my DNS provider was blocking that domain. I added a white-list entry for it and the Hub starts up fast now.
EDIT: Apparently Amplitude is a data collection service used by Unity Hub for telemetry. Even if you disable the “Opt In to Analytics” setting in Unity Hub, it still tries to contact this endpoint. That’s a bit deceptive on Unity’s part, in my opinion. Also, I don’t remember ever “opting in” to this setting, but it was set. Seems more like an “opt out” to me. Again, deceptive. Why is every tech company so deceptive when it comes to surveillance and privacy? And they wonder why their reputations have fallen through the floor in recent years.
I recently updated to Unity Hub 3.18.3 and in addition to the known startup delay issues, I’ve noticed a significant increase in file I/O operations. This is particularly noticeable for me because some of my older projects are stored on a mechanical HDD rather than an SSD, making the drive quite noisy during these operations.
In an attempt to mitigate this, I disabled the “Size” column in the project list, assuming it would stop Unity Hub from calculating directory sizes. However, the heavy disk activity persists, suggesting that the Hub continues to fetch project sizes in the background regardless of whether the column is visible.
If this is indeed the case, I would highly recommend that directory size calculations only run when the “Size” column is actively enabled.
I would highly recommend this entire column be deleted along with ALL activities that are NOT related to instantly launching the hub and INSTANTLY launching projects I tell it to.
I say this because FFS we have an operating system with a filesystem and graphical browser that can instantly give us useless information like how big a project is.
I mean seriously, how often do you need to know an updated project size in 2026?!
We released 3.19 to get the initial performance improvements out to users. We’re now validating the next wave of improvements. This includes: removing the size column, unlocking more actions while the license client is initializing, and reducing background updates.
Thanks for you patience as we work to make the Hub better!
Thank you. By the way, you also have to wait for the installation of a new editor version until the hub has finished scanning. All you get is this until then:
Can I just give a moment of appreciation for the latest update. Finally my hub now opens within 5 seconds again, showing my full list of projects, and I can click and open it immediately! This is massive, as this is what it was like originally before all the latest source control support additions, size measurement detection updates, etc. You’ve finally solve the months-long journey to bring things back up to original speed for me personally!
I know I was the perfect test-case as I have tons of projects in my hub linked to ones in bit-locked drives, no longer plugged in drives, some in source control, some not, some with missing Unity versions, etc, as I’ve been around in industry working on multiple projects for the last 4 years and have a reasonably built up Unity Hub project list.
All in all, good job for finally getting it back up to speed! I see the loading bar at the top, I see it’s still loading, but it’s correctly showing me what I want and not freezing up whilst it’s trying to do what should have been categorised this whole time as secondary objectives.
Good job! Keep these awesome updates up! I love the recent rush of Unity Hub love! Just make sure speed regression doesn’t creep in again, as it’s just gonna annoy a lot of people as it’ll add bottlenecks where there were none ever before.
So far all that’s been solved is that you don’t see a black background, not the big issue at hand: The Hub opens, but you can’t do anything because all features are locked like before. You have to wait about half a minute to be enabled to open a project. Or install an editor. You may as well have left the black screen with the doughnut.
