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Absolutely terrible new user experience with cloud build

Discussion in 'Unity Build Automation' started by Deleted User, Oct 23, 2020.

  1. Deleted User

    Deleted User

    Guest

    This is a rant by the way. But it has useful feedback from the perspective of a new user, trying to use the unity cloud website for the first time.

    So I want to build a iOS app to run on my own iPad, but I don’t have a Mac.

    so I see recommendation on some website saying, try cloud build, so I figured okay.

    go to project settings, see cloud build, turn it on, and it sits there with stupid message saying “Please wait....”. Honestly, this really isn’t the best message. What it ought to say is something more helpful, such as “FLEE FOR YOUR LIFE! GET OUT OF HERE NOW!” But to be honest, when I saw the Please Wait message, which is obviously a buggy message resulting from zero effort, I should have realized right then and there that anything I try from henceforth would be pretty much the same.

    so I see there’s a button to open some kind of dashboard, I click it, and it takes me to a website.

    website says I have to pay, but thankfully, it offers me a free trial. Yay. So I sign up, no problems there.

    then it tells me my code has to be on GitHub. Since I never used GitHub, this was quite a pain in the rear to set up. But being determined, I clawed my way through it, until I had a repository, with a branch, and a single read me file. And yea, without the read me file, the entire cloud website can’t even find the branch. No read me file, and the whole thing crashes with errors in big giant text. That should have been my second warning, that this service is not going to work. But being determined, I pressed on.

    Still seeing the “please wait” in the editor, I continue clicking buttons on the cloud build dashboard website, hoping something will magically start to work. I arrive at a page finally that is asking me for an apple developer ID. I look that up, and whatcha know, it costs a whopping $99 bucks to get that. Gee thanks. Wouldn’t it have been nice to have told me that hours ago, instead of dragging me through all this effort just to arrive at a massive paywall.

    but here’s the real kicker: it has tiny text that says I can use my apple store account instead. Well, actually it doesn’t say that. Instead, it says, IF I use my apple store account, then there might be some kind of problem. Actually, it kind of isn’t even clear what it said. But one thing is for sure, there is no option to use my apple store if, even though the message right there seems to suggest I can.

    so I’m back to google, trying to figure out if there is any way around his $99 paywall, and I find pages saying you can create a free apple dev ID, using your apple store account. Could this be what the confusing message meant? So I do it... I log in with my apple store account, on the apple developer portal, and it makes me agree to the developer agreement, and boom it’s done.

    so I go back to the cloud dashboard all excited, but I’m met with a message telling me to upload some file. No way to enter my apple store credentials. Meanwhile, the stupid message is still right there, which indicates that an apple store account could potentially be used. And meanwhile the editor still says “please wait...” on the cloud build page.

    Then somehow I back buttoned out of that page on the cloud dashboard website, and found that I could skip the part where I enter the credentials, and seemingly I could go on to the next page. So I did that, and well, the next page was even worse than the page I skipped. It was build settings or what not, with like a dozen confusing options that looked actually really important, with zero explanation.

    Then I found a button, finally, to actually upload my project to the cloud builder! Yay! So I click it, and it says, gimme a project file or gimme a folder. So I go to the folder than unity build for my little game with nothing but an empty scene, and we’ll, there is no project file, just a bunch of folders. Well thank goodness it accepts folders, right? Right? RIGHT? I mean, it literally says right there it accepts folders. But no matter what folder I try to give it, it will not actually let me select and upload a folder. No, if I click a folder, the only button that is there is “Open”, which doesn’t upload the folder, it just opens it on my screen. Actually impossible to upload anything to cloud.

    haha what a funny ending to a very sad story, right?

    I gave up. The end.
     
  2. ollieblanks

    ollieblanks

    Unity Technologies

    Joined:
    Aug 21, 2017
    Posts:
    459
    Hey @AaronBrownLM, thank you for providing your feedback. I'm saddened to hear that the hurdles of building for iOS have given you such a bad experience with the service. I will pass on your feedback to our Product Manager to let them know that the dashboard flow could be improved for new users.

    Unfortunately, Cloud Build is not designed to be a replacement for having a Mac and whichever site recommended Cloud Build as an alternative should have specified that a Mac is still required for creating an Apple Provisioning Profile and Certificate. For further reading on using Cloud Build to build to iOS platform, please see here.

    Also, it is worth noting that GitHub is not a requirement for Cloud Build, although a source control management system is necessary so that you can share your project's source code with the service. Cloud Build supports the following source control systems:
    I hope the above information gives you what you need to continue using the service, but if you no longer need your Teams Advanced subscription, please make sure that you turn of Automatic Renewal on the Unity ID Portal so that you do not get charged when the 1 month free trial expires.