I was a bit surprised to see that Unity iPhone is it’s own application, but what really surprised me was that Unity iPhone is a “newer” version of Unity, and it wouldn’t let me open my project in the standard Unity after converting it to the iPhone version.
Is it the long term idea to have Unity iPhone be a separate application - instead of just a build target like I was expecting - and if so, why lock people out of their projects in the standard Unity? Is developing for the iPhone so different from developing for a regular computer that you need to maintain two separate project folders if you want to release a game for desktop computers and iPhones?
I would assume because half of the features do not exist on it (No terrain, no shader, …) or even worse, because the texture compressions are not compatible (DXT vs PVRTC) for example.
you can not build the same project to different platforms anyway if the iphone one is meant to be performant.
As far as I’ve heard, it’s not the long-term plan, but it will stay that way for a while. Obviously it cannot be like the current version of Unity because the iPhone version implements support for the iPhone which I think is kind of like technology being so advanced it’s indistinguishable from magic given how different the architecture of the iPhone is compared to what Unity is usually targetting
I can understand that Unity would create a separate iPhone application to get the capability to us developers as soon as possible - in fact, I am very glad that they did!
It just didn’t “feel right” in the grand scope of things to have iPhone publishing always be inside a separate application.
I was just reading that it was announced at Unite that the Unity editor is coming to Windows, and if that is the case, then there are definitely a lot of updates in the works - and like you are saying, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if “unification” is one of them.
This sure is exciting! Now if only I could get my application to build without mono-iphone-xcompiler crashing, I would be just about as happy as I could possibly be… Please respond to my error ticket as soon as possible Unity support team!
