Greetings from the Graphics Platforms team.
In order to better focus on supporting the latest and greatest capabilities exposed by the modern graphics APIs, we will be removing support for GLES 2 and WebGL 1 during the Unity 2023.1 alpha.
Unity’s GLES 2 and WebGL 1 graphics backends have been officially deprecated since Unity 2022. Since then, we have been closely monitoring the runtime player usage of both the GLES3 and WebGL 2 graphics APIs, in order to ensure the availability and utilization of these (more modern) graphics backends across all relevant platforms.
GLES 3 has been widely available and stable for a very long time (around 10 years!), while WebGL 2 is now also widely supported across all popular browsers, including Safari as of iOS 15 and later. GLES 2 is significantly limited in functionality compared to GLES 3, and is missing a lot of modern graphics and compute capabilities that are now crucial for enabling Unity’s existing and future graphics feature set.
As we aim to deliver the most meaningful gains for both visuals and performance, we will continue to focus on improving our support and utilization of the modern graphics APIs (e.g. Vulkan, Metal, DX12) across mobile, desktop and console platforms.
As always, your feedback is crucial, so please let us know if you have any input or concerns. Also, feel free to reach out to our team via the public roadmap.