Would Unity be able to function as an App?

News & General Discussion
1

Hey guys!

I have been making games in Unity for some years now, but now I’m wondering if Unity can be used for more than games. I believe not, but would like to know where to go then?

I want to make an App for Phones / computers where requires you to be able to:

  • Register and make an account
  • Pay with credit cards, MobilePay and such
  • Have a GPS function just like Uber

I am totally lost where I have to start on this project?
Where is Apps like Uber made?

2

As it was repeatedly said before, for making an APP you’ll be better of using some GUI toolkit like Qt 5, because unity is a game engine, meaning you’ll get massive battery drain on application that doesn’t do anythign special.

To access GPS coordinates use Location Service class.

Registering and paying is matter of either sending data to external website via www class or using existing api (as long as you can connect it to C#, you can use it).

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3

There is Xamarin studio that is now free. If you are used to C# and Unity, switching to it should be seamless.

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4

So you can make the whole app in Qt5 or what do you mean?
Also, am I wrong saying that all Apps released on App Store has to be made or at least finished in Xcode?

5

What makes this better than Xcode?? :slight_smile:
Maybe they are 2 completely different things, I dont know if they are though.

6

With Xcode you must use either objective c, c++ or swift, not c#.
Plus the code run only on iOS while xamarin studio can run on both iOS and Android.

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7

If you are making app, i would stick away from unity unless you need some 3d rendering for your app. Reason are you cant do native UI work in unity and it will use a lot more energy with its constantly ticking game loop and 3d rendering than a proper app framework.

Personally i would go the route of using Xamarin since it uses C# and can build apps that use native controls on Android and iOS. If i was only targeting one platform i would just use Android Studio or XCode and the respective Java or Swift/ObjC used by them. But if going multi platform i would definitely go with Xamarin and have for a handful of apps.

You should feel pretty at home with Xamarin if you are experience with .net and C# from unity, the only huge difference in usage would be the usage of Tasks and Async functions.