Unity Cloud good enough to replace Mac computer?

I'm considering starting making some iOS games and, as most indies, I have a limited amount of cash. I can either invest it in a subscription-based Unity Pro or a Mac. I have a Windows PC atm. I would rather give the money to Unity rather than Apple for now, tbh

So, my questions are:
1. Is Unity Cloud reliable enough to replace having a Mac entirely?
2. Can I still make debug builds, use the profiler, etc?
3. Is the beta available for people with subscriptions as well ( I would get the iOS Pro sub as well, ofc)?
4. Is there anything else I would absolutely NEED a Mac for?

Thanks. Any additional ideas or concerns are welcomed.

 

Huh...interesting thought. Could be. Honestly, the answer is going to be "too soon to tell", I think. However, it looks like it is reliable enough to, at the very least, delay buying a Mac until you come across a situation that UCB is insufficient for.

One weakness (and this might just be me not knowing how to do it) is, I don't believe UCB allows you to modify the XCode project after it builds it from Unity. This means that a lot of binary iOS-specific plugins may not work.

#2: Doesn't seem like it. If you can use the profiler with a UCB-made build, I haven't yet figured out how.
#3: I'm on a Pro subscription and have access to it.
#4: From my point of view, general sanity.... but whatever floats your boat?

 

Thanks for your reply! I think you could edit the Xcode project with a post-process custom script... But yeah, it probably is a bit more messy... And the lack of debug mode/profiler could be a real issue

 

How do you figure? Isn't that all done on developer.apple.com?

 

Oh, right. That part.

 

Thank you very much for clarifying! Guess I'm going with a Mac for now and Unity Pro once I start making money

 

Many thanks! That pretty much clarifies everything. I will look into buying a Mac. There are some nice ones available for under 400$ (although they are a tad bit old).

 

I have an iMac I bought in 2009 that works fine with Unity.

My main dev machine is Win 8.1.

I have a Unity Pro subscription with iOS Pro.

Since I'm not working on iOS specific optimization at the moment (focusing on Windows Store right now), I'm using UCB to do test builds for iOS (just to make sure I haven't totally borked my game), which frees up the Unity license my iMac was using to use on my dev machine at home.

It's pretty cool working from home, 10km from my iMac. I check my code into SVN and soon after I get an email with a link to install the latest version of my game, wirelessly from the clould, directly to my iPad.

We are living in the future!

 

heh UCB does indeed sound very convenient for making quick builds! While it cannot entirely replace having a mac, it is still really awesome to have.

 

I definitely recommend getting a mac especially for testing on ios devices. As much as I wish Unity was the holy grail to publish once to many platforms you still need to make changes across platforms.

 

I use a 2008 Mac Pro for the iOS side of things, and it works just fine. However, UCB will still dramatically reduce the amount of frequently wasted time spent exporting XCode projects over to the Mac from my PC and then having to add frameworks, build the project, export to IPA, etc... I rarely need a profiler-compatible build unless there are performance issues i need to investigate.

I think there are ways to use a PC to generate the p12, provisions, etc though. You may not actually need a Mac unless you want developer/debug builds.

 

I tested the whole iOS publishing part except submitting it to the AppStore. I could do the whole road until AppStore without a physical Apple computer by using a VirtualMachine. I'm not sure if that's officially allowed, but it did work. The reason for trying this was after playing with Kivy, which is a Python API for creating multitouch applications, but also for Android and iOS. However the publishing for these platforms can only be done on Linux and Mac OSX, which made me come up with that idea when I saw they had special VM file for Linux. Soon I want tot test what happens if I submit it to the AppStore

 

Get a mac mini! This is around 400 pounds and will connect to a standard monitor and keyboard. This is the cheapest apple development option I have found.

 

JD, just to reiterate what Nate wrote above - Unity Cloud Build cannot be used as a replacement for having a Mac computer for iOS development.

 

I think we get that part, but what about using UCB during development? As it stands, I prefer to develop on my PC. I will have to push this over to my mac laptop and push to my device from there, which is a real pain. Can I just use UCB to bypass this process entirely, until I'm ready to publish to the store?

 

Yes. I do this all the time.

You need to use your Mac to create the "p12" and "mobileprovision" files (you only need to do this once per dev account renewal) and provide those files to UCB when you setup the iOS build target for your project. The new UCB beta will even cache those files so you don't have to re-upload them for each project.

Once UCB finishes the build, you open the UCB site on your iOS device and click a link to wirelessly download and install the game.

 

Excellent, thanks. This is exactly the info I was looking for!

 

I've just started playing around with Unity and have managed to build for Android with UCB. I don't have a Mac. I'm thinking of two options for iOS builds:

1) Do what minimum I have to on some friend's Mac.

2) Use something like http://www.macincloud.com, i.e., cloud rental.

I'd prefer #2 as I could use it anytime from home. Does anyone have any ideas, pointers, experiences to share?

For testing, I have an iPad mini. That'll do for now.

 

I have some experience with www.macincloud.com. I used it to build the final version of an application I was working on for a client. Because of the delay to the server it can be somewhat of a pain to do simple things. That being said it is definitely a great tool to get you out of a bind when you don't have a mac.

As for getting around all the provisioning files, I wrote a batch script for windows that takes advantage of OpenSSL to help you in generating all the files you need to get that ios app built.

Credit to this youtube video for showing me how I just automated all the steps with the script.

Unity wouldn't let me upload the .bat so just change the .txt to .bat and run.

 

I know Nate's post is old, but I was looking for a good guide to help through the iOS configuration for cloud build. I'm new both to developing for iOS and using Cloud Build. I was happy to see him mention a specific guide for iOS having gone through the tutorial and it only shows WebGL. But it seems the guide may have only been available to beta users or is locked away somewhere? I copied and pasted the guide name in quotes and Google couldn't find it. Is there some magic area where this can be found?

btw.. Really hating Apple for requiring a friggin mac to develop mobile games.. lol I was kind of hoping I could get by with doing everything in my apple developer account online and then bypassing the mac requirement with Cloud Build since video on my old Macbook Pro just died. Going to try some of the workarounds listed here. But if anyone can point me to the guide @hypeNate talked about or one that would be helpful for wrapping ones head around the whole provisioning profile (and other parts specific to iOS cloud build) setup, that would be awesome!

Edit: Actually I just found the link in another thread in a response by
@dannyd... For some reason Google didn't pick it up and return in search results. I wonder if maybe those pages aren't being indexed? At any rate, here is the link for those who might be looking... https://build.cloud.unity3d.com/support/guides/ios/

 

A few months ago I switched from UCB to iOS Project Builder for Windows. It works really well.

A project that takes hours with UCB, I can build and deploy in just minutes using this asset on my high end PC.

UCB is still great if you are simulatenously creating builds for multiple platforms.

But for quick test builds to iOS, there's no contest.

 

Thx... Will take a look.

 

Is this still the case in 2021? I have UCB subs as well as a ioS developer program. Dev machine is Wintel. Is it still the case that you need to spend 2k on a machine you don't want just to do test build for iPhone and iPad?