Xamarin and Unity for game and data management

Unity Engine
1

I have a couple of questions.
We are developing mobile applications for our products and we are trying to choose between unity and Xamarin.
We already use Unity for our products, but now we will translate it to mobile. Some will be games and some will be other types of applications.
First:
1 - Do you think that we can use Unity for these tasks?
what our applications do:

  • Connect to multiple Bluetooth devices
  • Save data from the devices to our own cloud
  • Collect players questionnaire data
  • save it in our cloud
  • 4 different membership types

Second:
Or…can we integrate Xamarin to Unity?
For example, have the game be in unity and Xamarin control UI, connections and data

Our games are all in Unity, so I would like to keep using it, but I am afraid of the data management and connection process.

Thank you!

2

Mobile enterprise developer here, but my current Unity projects have back-end server requirements (an educational game & a commercial single-player RPG). My advice would be to use the appropriate tools for each job.

Keep your game development in Unity, and your back-end services in server-side technologies. I’ve used/am using Firebase & Google Cloud for my projects, but if you already have server stack preferences/resources from your non-mobile projects, there’s no reason to toss those out. Unity has plenty of hooks to connect to your remote services, so you can leverage your existing expertise.

For Bluetooth, you can experiment with either C#/.NET libraries to handle your needs, or use platform-specific plug-ins to tailor specifically for each mobile platform. Depending on your mobile development familiarity, you could also look into the ongoing experimental Unity-as-a-Library projects for mobile platforms, too.

Xamarin IMO is worthwhile for capitalizing on an existing C#/.NET codebase, or if you are building a mobile-first application without any in-house native or web app developers. Otherwise there are usually better options in terms of feature-flexibility, support, or debugging/maintenance requirements.

Hope that helps!

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