Ok, imagine a world.
A world where you can use unity on your foldable Samsung Galaxy Note 12, non-combustable edition to develop games using Unity.
Seriously - what if there was a unity development platform for android!
Thoughts?
That may be an interesting point - but remember that these days, some androids are pretty powerful little devices, have external bluetooth keyboards, and even intel processors.
EDIT: For instance this one here
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I’m far more interested in Chrome OS as many schools in my area (which has historically been very backwards - we had Apple IIs when Windows 95 was coming out) are now switching to Chromebooks for the majority of the tasks the students are performing.
Supporting Android wouldn’t be a bad thing though. My Android tablet is far more portable than my ASUS ROG laptop, and an ultrabook is simply too far outside of my price range for a device that is only slightly more practical than my tablet.
Okay, but that’s just your own needs. We’re not all working on a project of the same complexity and for those of us that do we’re not always working on aspects of the project that need high performance. For the past month my work has been focused almost exclusively on the UI and animations. Anything made in the past decade would be fine for that.
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I can’t count the number of times I’ve said to myself “man, I’m bored sitting here, wish my phone had unity on it” and then gone off and downloaded some POS app for C# or python or something, and been let down over and over again.
If UT built a distro for android, they’d open up third world countries to unity… people who can’t afford an Apple or Windows machine on a months pay, might already have a halfway decent android tablet sitting around somewhere.
I think it’d be both a brilliant business idea, and help democratize game development a step further.
I’m pretty sure Unity isn’t out there working on a game engine because you get bored on your phone sometimes. There’s no practical reason to invest the absolutely ridiculous amount of work that it would take to make this a reality.
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Jusy starting Unity on a slow computer gives me ADHD
Loading a project would kill me
The practical reason being more money… if there is a wider group of people using unity on more devices…
The examples you gave of market expansions were literally from markets with little to no buying power who just happen to have a powerful enough Android tablet to run an entire game engine. Not only that, but you’re ignoring the state of things like creation tools needed outside of the Unity editor to work.
I’m getting the Huawei Mate X foldable phone, it would be pretty awesome just for fun brining up Unity on it.
Though, could as well do it over Remote desktop
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This is a part of the reason I got a Surface. They’re expensive, but there are now cheaper alternatives that’ll do the same stuff.
It’s small enough that I can chuck it in my shoulder bag, and it’s no powerhouse but is plenty enough for writing code, many Editor tasks, game jamming, prototyping, etc.
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Problem with the surface though is that they flipped it. A traditional laptop have the thick part in the keyboard and the thin part is the screen. A pad has the thick part in the screen and the thin part in the keyboard.
I like the classic form factor better 
though the surface are sexy, I’m pretty happy with my Asus flip though.
The surface looks cool - I may have to get my hands on one of those. But still… android is an open OS, with widely available ranges of hardware/software variants… so yeah it might be difficult to make it happen - but lets say UT took one reliable build like the newest ones from google, and used that as a starting point, which means all older less capable devices wouldn’t be able to run the engine, but anything modern with decent hardware as a starting point, would be able to.
I still run a galaxy note 4 - which is quite an old phone these days, but I’ve replaced the screen, got an otterbox, can turn televisions on and off in bars for the fun of it, and write on the screen with a wacom stylus.
Challenge me to make a game using just that, and I might 
If I had unity on there? It’d be probably dead every few hours cuz the battery is going out 
Question is: how many of you are out there? (In this regard) And how many of you would buy additional subscription for the convenience? I don’t think it would be that many…
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I don’t think there would be that many either… but I have been known to be wrong in the past.
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Yeah, me too.
That’s not “the problem”, it’s “the point”. There were already loads of laptops that run standard Windows software. There wasn’t a gap there. But there weren’t many (any?) tablet form devices that could run standard Windows software.
In that regard it hasn’t fully succeeded. They’re great devices, but software that uses it well in tablet mode is still few and far between.
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Unity is removing Android Intel support for builds, due to hardly anyone actually using it, so I’d guess the chance of an editor is somewhere between 0 and 0.
–Eric
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I’m just waiting for the day when they remove Android altogether, due to hardly anyone being successful with it.
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