I’m considering starting making some iOS games and, as most indies, I have a limited amount of cash. I can either invest it in a subscription-based Unity Pro or a Mac. I have a Windows PC atm. I would rather give the money to Unity rather than Apple for now, tbh
So, my questions are:
Is Unity Cloud reliable enough to replace having a Mac entirely?
Can I still make debug builds, use the profiler, etc?
Is the beta available for people with subscriptions as well ( I would get the iOS Pro sub as well, ofc)?
Is there anything else I would absolutely NEED a Mac for?
Thanks. Any additional ideas or concerns are welcomed.
Huh…interesting thought. Could be. Honestly, the answer is going to be “too soon to tell”, I think. However, it looks like it is reliable enough to, at the very least, delay buying a Mac until you come across a situation that UCB is insufficient for.
One weakness (and this might just be me not knowing how to do it) is, I don’t believe UCB allows you to modify the XCode project after it builds it from Unity. This means that a lot of binary iOS-specific plugins may not work.
#2: Doesn’t seem like it. If you can use the profiler with a UCB-made build, I haven’t yet figured out how. #3: I’m on a Pro subscription and have access to it. #4: From my point of view, general sanity… but whatever floats your boat?
Thanks for your reply! I think you could edit the Xcode project with a post-process custom script… But yeah, it probably is a bit more messy… And the lack of debug mode/profiler could be a real issue
@Oana - UCB cannot be used as a replacement for having a Mac computer. You will definitely need a mac in order to develop games for iOS using UCB. Without a Mac, you can’t create your mobile provision files, debug on the device, or submit your app to the App Store.
@StarManta - parts of it are, yes. But you have to download your cert from Apple and use your Keychain Access utility (on your Mac) to export to p12, for example. Our “Building for iOS with Unity Cloud Build” guide explains all of this in more detail.
Yes, the beta is also available for pro subscriptions but you need to use it for at leased 12 months anyway until you can cancel the subscription. So just for testing, this might not be what you want but it provides awesome content and it’s worth every buck.
A mac is always handy when it fits your needs. Especially when you want to debug, profile or publish the app in the end. This can’t be replaced by any other device, as it is a crutial part where it needs some attention of the developer using different profiling tools.
Edit: Just to clarify again, UCB cannot be used as a replacement for having a Mac computer. You will definitely need a mac in order to develop games for iOS using UCB. Without a Mac, you can’t create your mobile provision files, debug on the device, or submit your app to the App Store.
Many thanks! That pretty much clarifies everything. I will look into buying a Mac. There are some nice ones available for under 400$ (although they are a tad bit old).
I have an iMac I bought in 2009 that works fine with Unity.
My main dev machine is Win 8.1.
I have a Unity Pro subscription with iOS Pro.
Since I’m not working on iOS specific optimization at the moment (focusing on Windows Store right now), I’m using UCB to do test builds for iOS (just to make sure I haven’t totally borked my game), which frees up the Unity license my iMac was using to use on my dev machine at home.
It’s pretty cool working from home, 10km from my iMac. I check my code into SVN and soon after I get an email with a link to install the latest version of my game, wirelessly from the clould, directly to my iPad.
I definitely recommend getting a mac especially for testing on ios devices. As much as I wish Unity was the holy grail to publish once to many platforms you still need to make changes across platforms.
I use a 2008 Mac Pro for the iOS side of things, and it works just fine. However, UCB will still dramatically reduce the amount of frequently wasted time spent exporting XCode projects over to the Mac from my PC and then having to add frameworks, build the project, export to IPA, etc… I rarely need a profiler-compatible build unless there are performance issues i need to investigate.
I think there are ways to use a PC to generate the p12, provisions, etc though. You may not actually need a Mac unless you want developer/debug builds.
I tested the whole iOS publishing part except submitting it to the AppStore. I could do the whole road until AppStore without a physical Apple computer by using a VirtualMachine. I’m not sure if that’s officially allowed, but it did work. The reason for trying this was after playing with Kivy, which is a Python API for creating multitouch applications, but also for Android and iOS. However the publishing for these platforms can only be done on Linux and Mac OSX, which made me come up with that idea when I saw they had special VM file for Linux. Soon I want tot test what happens if I submit it to the AppStore
Get a mac mini! This is around 400 pounds and will connect to a standard monitor and keyboard. This is the cheapest apple development option I have found.
I think we get that part, but what about using UCB during development? As it stands, I prefer to develop on my PC. I will have to push this over to my mac laptop and push to my device from there, which is a real pain. Can I just use UCB to bypass this process entirely, until I’m ready to publish to the store?
You need to use your Mac to create the “p12” and “mobileprovision” files (you only need to do this once per dev account renewal) and provide those files to UCB when you setup the iOS build target for your project. The new UCB beta will even cache those files so you don’t have to re-upload them for each project.
Once UCB finishes the build, you open the UCB site on your iOS device and click a link to wirelessly download and install the game.
