Unity 2020.2.1.
In the documentation is stated that the minimum iOS version is 10, but the editor forces us to 11. Is this really a necessary increment?
We are currently on Unity 2017 and we plan to migrate to Unity 2019 or even on Unity 2020 (Unity 2018 has an awful physics bug that is reported and reproduced but it took 2 months to get any reply and we can’t wait anymore). We still have around 8% of users on iOS 9 and about 6.5% on iOS 10. If you combine that we will lose 14.5% of users, that is 14.5% revenue cut out only because of this increment. We could take a hit of losing 8% and move over to iOS 10, but moving to 11 and losing 14.5% is too much.
Another thread about this: why the minimum is iOS 11?
//Ignore this part
iOS: Removed OpenGL ES support on iOS/tvOS.
Some user devices don’t support Metal, this also makes moving to the newer Unity version quite impossible. Why forcing removal? We could easily remove it or add it by our choice in previous versions.
I’m curious. If you’re targeting such old devices, why are you in such a rush to migrate existing projects to 2020.2.x? By the time 2019 LTS support ends, these devices will be a decade old.
To answer your title question. It is an inefficient use of Unity’s resources to maintain support for both GLES and Metal for iOS. With 2019 LTS, Unity is actually committed to supporting these devices for half a decade after Apple itself dropped support for them. If you were Unity, when would you drop support for them?
This is similar to Unity dropping support for DX9/WinXP. At some point you have to drop support because it isn’t worth the expense. You’re never going to make everyone happy when you do, but you can’t support legacy operating systems forever, and you have other projects which need those development resources freed up.
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Unity 2017 and 2018 have performance issues, Unity 2019.4.17 fixed a major bug that was introduced in 2019 but still has some performance issues that we need to look closely at. As it looks, Unity 2020.2 solves micro stutters and previous performance problems, it is almost flawless in our case regarding performance. We waited for this a very long time, ever since Unity 4, and would like to move to it in the near time even if it is still not LTS.
I agree with you regarding GLES and Metal question. We already decided to move to Metal only, ignore this part.
We’ve got about a year left on 2019 LTS legacy support, and iOS 10 is only 4 years old. A “decade” is a bit of an exaggeration =P
I understand the rationales behind why they’re dropping < 11.0 due to GLES v Metal overheads, but seriously a blog post or announcement from Unity would have been most professional… you know, as opposed to sneaking it into the bottom of the changelog notes with a ninja page edit.
I said the devices would be a decade old, referring to devices which Apple decided iOS 9/10 was the end of their software support. Like the iPhone 5 which entered the market in 2012 and can’t update beyond iOS 10. Devices like the iPhone 7, which did initially ship with iOS 10, can just update to the current release of iOS 15.