Access all of Android inside Unity

We're pleased to announce the launch of AndroidBridge for Unity.

AndroidBridge is a unity plugin that bridges Unity platform with Android. It provides Unity developers with complete access to Android and Java platform. With AndroidBridge you can grow Unity from a game engine to a full blown app development engine for Android (and soon for iOS too with the upcoming launch of iOSBridge). There are numerous benefits of using AndroidBridge over other solutions. Please, check out the the plugin to learn more.

Limitations of current approach

By default Unity developers have to resort to using different plugins in order to access any platform specific APIs that are not provided by Unity. This approach presents different challenges of its own:

1. Although there are plugins for many different APIs but there is still a lot that is not covered simply because of the lack of enough demand to warrant a plugin development for that specific API that you need. In that case you have to either invest resources to develop the plugin on your own and/or outsource and/or let go of that platform specific feature.
2. If the plugin exist it simply might not be cost effective to invest in buying plugins for every other API required for various projects.
3. Whenever new features are added or previous APIs deprecated you have to wait for the plugin developers to update to latest version or fix any broken API calls.
4. Inconsistency in documentation and implementation of various plugins also means that a coherent process is not followed since every plugin developer has a unique way of packaging and presenting API calls in Unity.
5. By default Unity only supports the “communication” with Android on its main thread thus limiting any implementations that require multithreaded approach either be it for a single plugin or different plugins thus blocking any new calls unless a previous has returned.

Benefits of using AndroidBridge

Grow Unity from a game engine to a full blown app development engine for Android (and soon for iOS too with the upcoming launch of iOSBridge). There are numerous benefits that AndroidBridge offers, some of them are listed below:

1. All Android, all the time: Developers get access to any and all APIs that they might need from Android including any Java libraries.
2. Everything you need, nothing you don’t: Only binding code for the required APIs is generated to avoid unnecessary overheads with complete support for code hinting in MonoDevelop, VisualStudio or any other ide developers might be using.
3. Complete support for polymorphism: Not only you can call Android/Java APIs but also extend any classes and implement any interfaces etc
4. Full multi-threading support: Don’t be limited by single blocking threads anymore. Want to do some native background stuff done without affecting your fps? With AndroidBridge you can.
5. Automatic garbage collection: You worry about building those awesome apps and games, let us take care of the garbage with full automatic memory management support across platforms.
6. Code it, while it’s hot: You don’t have to wait for TerraCode to provide updated APIs for any libraries. Want to use the new feature in the latest version of that library you love? Just point the AndroidBridge to the new library and it will regenerate the latest APIs for you without waiting for any updates from anyone.

Checkout more at:
https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/tools/utilities/androidbridge-lite-120636
https://terracode.io

We're open to any suggestions and feature or support requests.
Hope this helps,
AndroidBridge Team @ TerraCode

 

Hey,

This seems interesting. Can I generate Android plugins with this and submit them to Asset Store?

 

Sure, until the general dev community catches up to this I suppose you can do that since nothing in our terms and conditions prevents users from generating plugins and submitting them in AssetStore.

Just make sure you are not sharing/submitting the Editor portion of the plugin i.e. omit the Editor folder from inside Plugins/AndroidBridge directory when submitting.

 

Just bought it. I will post the review after testing it.

 

Thank you. Let me know if you need any help.

 

Here's a simple tutorial to get you started:

I highly recommend you to check out the documentation for details. More tutorials coming soon. HTH

 

OH THAT IS GREAT. Thanks for the help man.

P.S. I have already started using the plugin.

Loving it so far.

 

What's the difference b/w the Lite and Pro version? And when will the iOSBridge launch?

 

The main difference b/w Lite and Pro is that Pro supports bridging third-party libraries JAR/AAR while Lite version doesn't. And Pro version supports all the latest APIs while Lite version supports API level 16.

iOSBridge is in early testing, we might offer early adopters of AndroidBridge to test it out later this month.

 

I will be waiting to test that .

Thanks