Texture import option "alpha is transparency" stopped working for ETC1 RGB4 textures in Unity 5.5

Texture import option “alpha is transparency” stopped working for ETC1 RGB4 textures in Unity 5.5

Before Unity 5.5 option “alpha is transparency” would properly generate ETC1 RGB4 texture with some additional pixels in order to avoid fringes issues on the border of a textures with alpha. In Unity 5.5 this stopped working.

We use ETC1 RGB4 format with our own compressed alpha texture(sorry we don’t use built-in auto split alpha texture since it’s not stable and we don’t have much control over the resulting alpha).

Here are the images of the same texture grabbed from Android device. The first one is generated with Unity 5.4.3, another - with Unity 5.5

P.S. Yep, I filed a bug but maybe someone has an idea for workaround?

I have this problem too for my android game since upgrading to 5.5.0f3 64bit. The issue still remains on the builded .apk when going to the texture importer platform tabs (where it’s displaying Default) where you can override the texture with specific settings for each platform like compression, format. However, in the game/scene view it looks like it should.