Serious question to Unity about the state of iOS and the future of Web deployment

Hello, my name is Sebastian and I am the CTO of a company in Sweden.
We have used Unity professionally since version 2.6. We're not using it to develop games, we do other kinds of visualization heavy applications.

The two main platforms in this field, for us, is the Web and iOS. For some reason (most likely cause we are in Sweden), Android is much less interesting to our customers than iOS.

We are 19 employees and almost everything we produce we produce with Unity these days. Unity has become a core part of our business.

Right now, we are in a really bad spot. We have a number of really big applications to all our biggest clients (about 6-7 projects of 3-6 month scale in size) that we develop in Unity. All are targeting iOS, Web or both. When we started some of these projects, we assumed that things would be working at this stage, but they simply aren't.
Unity 5 isn't out. WebGL isn't working (RC2 hardcrashes mozilla 1 out of 3 times on most of our test computers). Unity 4.x doesn't have a working iOS 64 bit, which means there is no iOS at all. When I saw the 64 bit demand coming up we of course hoped there would be a working 64 bit Unity coming before the demand was enforced, but that wasn't the case. The IL2CPP 64 bit iOS deploy crashes frequently, and many core features are missing. We also work with Coherent UI, and 4.6.2 (needed for 64 bit, even though that doesn't work either) broke something that means Coherent UI isn't working at all. They have reported this error here on the forum, but no Unity employee have even replied to that thread.

So, as CTO, I am the person that the people at my company turn to for answers. And right now, I really don't know what to do. The release candidates for Unity 5 aren't promising; and I am quite baffled at how little people actually complain at 5 beta forums. I mean, it really isn't working yet. And pretty much the only response the issue threads get these days are "Can you send a repro project?", and then there is silence. People ask if Unity were actually able to reproduce the problem; or if they even got the project, but there are no more replies.

What I'm trying to say is, I'm kind losing my faith. I'm afraid Unity 4.X will never work in iOS. I'm afraid Unity 5.0 wont work stable in iOS and wont work in WebGL at all. That leaves us in a position where we can't use Unity at all. So, can any Unity employee reply to this thread and give me some faith back? Are you seeing a light at the end of the tunnel where IL2CPP will actually work, and how bad will the "WebGL preview" really be? (For me, a preview is a feature lacking but working product, not something that crashes 1 out of 3 times in an empty scene).

Best wishes,
from a person that made an entire company change from Flash and Director to fully use Unity,
Sebastian

 

Ouch. I have two iOS projects in development for clients right now.. What do I tell them..and when?? I feel your pain Sebastian.

 

OMG I've never heard of a beta that crashes before.

 

I understand the frustration. I feel lucky that I haven't been hit by any of that stuff myself - we've been steering clear of web deployment for anything other than WIPs for a while knowing that'd be rocky ground, and feel lucky on the iOS front.

To be fair that's kind of what I'd expect, though. They're pushing things towards the appropriate channels for resolution. As a CTO I'm sure you've had to deal with the issue where some users phone in bug reports, others email them, employees give them verbally, etc. etc. How do you deal with it? You push all of them to some centralised system, and the people who actually fix the bugs only track them with that system, because you want them focusing on the bugs, not tracking a bunch of arbitrary reporting sources to talk back to.

 

to angrypenguin:
As I'm sure you understand we haven't had the luxury of choosing. Saying no to all Web projects last year would have meant we needed to do layoffs. They are a big part of our business.
And trying to finish those projects faster wouldn't have changed anything; the released version would in their eyes have "stopped working" when the webplayer stops working in Chrome (40% of Sweden use Chrome). The contracts for most of those projects were signed around the summer or early autumn; and we hoped then that there wouldn't be a situation where we are left with many months of having no working Unity web publish at all.
Other customers for previous projects (from '13 and earlier) are also very frustrated with us now. They see their web applications not working, and they ask us for a solution, and we can't really do anything at the moment.

With iOS development, we are in a just as bad of a position. Our customers would never accept putting up a half-baked version on the appstore in january to be able to do updates to the 32 bit version at the actual release. And we couldn't have finished these projects faster, since all of our projects are relying on information and data from our customers; which in many cases isn't even available to them earlier than for example the release of a physical product (that they want to sell and showcase using an iOS app).

Many months ago I saw that there was a big uncertainty coming up around the start of 2015, and I informed our customers and our own company about the possible upcoming troubles; but customers look to us to "just solve" these things. With this thread I want some new hope, to be able to even continue working on these applications in Unity. Otherwise I will just have to come up with some totally different solution, be it image-based pure web or pure xcode solutions or, well who knows.. I'm not sure if our clients will accept those kinds of less-than-ideal workarounds, however.

Regarding their responses on the forum:
I don't agree. When our clients ask us about minor bugs or missing features they would like to see, I probably do a similar response as Unity does (not really though, but that's cause we are such a small company and have fewer clients, so I see your point).
But that's not whats happening here. Right now I see so many of the Unity customers being frustrated about the application not working at all. Not small bugs, but big gamebreaking things. The communication between Unity and us users were great back in mid 2014, but as time went on the communication got worse and more sparse. I would have hoped for the opposite; the more bad things are looking, and the more people are frustrated, the more communication we need. I mean as an example, a core feature of Unity 4 is the iOS publishing obviously. I would argue that's even the core feature of Unity 4. And right now, that feature just isn't working. Working Unity apps can't be published to the appstore right now. I would expect this to be headline news at Unity, and something were progress is being reported on as much as possible, but the communcation is sparse and isolated to a few threads and one or two blogposts.

to Nubz:
A Release Candidate is not a beta. That's why they called "beta 21" a beta, and RC2 a Release Candidate. Also, my questioning wasn't about the state of the current version, but about what we can expect from the WebGL version in 5.0. So I really don't get your post.

 

For iOS IL2CPP have you been following the official thread where the devs are handling stuff daily? nearly everyone has been given some response and there have been small status updates of things like these:

http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/4-6-ios-64-bit-beta.290551/page-14#post-1967455

Also have you or any of your team members reported the bugs via bug reporter? and if so then you could also post the case number in the thread and maybe ask about progress if its a serious problem.

 

Yes I have followed that thread of course. But I'm sure you can read from my post that I think what they are doing is enough. The several pages long blog post about 4.6.2 talks about performance and new oppertunities and fails to mention that it simply doesn't work at all. And even though they have acknowledged many of the problems on the forum the blog post updates (there are updates) also fails to mention this. They could, you know, type in the head of that blog post "This verison isn't working, and we currently have no 64 bit version of Unity for iOS, meaning there is no way of putting an Unity app on the iOS appstore right now.". I mean, seeing as that is by far the most important takeaway from 4.6.2.

 

First, I think you are exaggerating a bit there when you are saying it's completely busted and unusable. It might have been in the first versions with projects using complex plugins or code (for me at least). Now I get most of them running and the other problems are things like sockets support etc that are already coming. Just following the thread does not magically get things fixed. If you have submitted reports then drop the case numbers there and ask the status. If you did not report them then they are not going to be fixed fast or at all. If you saw someone else already reporting same bugs then you still should report your as your case might be a bit different or even if it's the same it gets priorities up as they see more people are affected by it.

 

Thank you for your lengthy reply. I will formulate a good answer as soon as I have time.

 

Same thing different words use to name it so people like you can feel warm and fuzzy about it.

 

have you considered the premium support contract?... you are the CTO of a 20'ish man company whom dependent on Unity working for your projects and clients to make ends meet.. right?

atleast then you've got grounds to get solid, timely, and direct answers and support... or maybe you already do?