Windows 8.1 and Windows Phone 8.1 will be dropped after Unity 5.6

Unity Engine
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1

What’s up with that:

  • Windows: Windows Store: Windows 8.1 and Windows Phone 8.1 will be dropped after Unity 5.6. Unity 5.6 is therefore the last Unity release supporting these SDKs.

Is this limited to the separate list entries “8.1” and “Phone 8.1” or does this also affect Universal 8.1?

Build app package for windows 8.1
2

Universal 8.1 simply combines the 8.1 and Phone 8.1 into one package.
Yes, all of 8.1 will be dropped.

3

Thanks for the clarification.
While I somehow understand the decision (not really any new devices being manufactured), I also don’t. MS might not admit it, but WinPhone 8.1 is still huge in terms of market share (according to Adduplex from Dec 2016, Windows Phone 8.1 has a market share of 77% of all Windows Mobile versions!).

The blog states:
Unity 5.6 will receive patches for an additional 12 months after release to ensure you can use it as a stable platform for shipping your projects

Can we at least count on that?
The 12 months really actually start after the upcoming release?

4

Yes, 12 months start when 5.6 gets officially released.

While Windows Phone 8.1 still shares a lot of Windows phone market share, the Windows Phone market itself is super tiny:

http://hwstats.unity3d.com/mobile/os.html

Just 0.9% of all mobile devices are running Windows Phone 8.1. Situation on desktop is a lot different:

http://hwstats.unity3d.com/pc/os.html
http://hwstats.unity3d.com/pc/os-wsa.html

28% of the market share is Windows Store applications on PC, and 75% of that is running Windows 10 (and its market share is also growing compared to Windows 8.1).

It is also not possible to deploy to Windows 8.1 and Windows Phone 8.1 with VS2017 anymore either (Microsoft themselves dropped support for it).

There were several reasons we decided to drop it:

  1. No new devices are being manufactured or sold;
  2. The existing market share is tiny and is shrinking;
  3. There’s non-trivial amount of maintenance work to do on it;
  4. Any new features we implement (like IL2CPP) would require us to spend even more time on a dying OS.
5

Thanks for the clarification.

6

Good for you Unity. Focus is important.