Building games for devices like the iPhone and iPad requires a different approach than you would use for desktop PC games. Unlike the PC market, your target hardware is standardized and not as fast or powerful as a computer with a dedicated video card. Because of this, you will have to approach the development of your games for these platforms a little differently. Also, the features available in Unity for iOSApple’s mobile operating system. More info
See in Glossary differ slightly from those for desktop PCs.
You don’t need an Apple Developer account to build to devices; any Apple ID is sufficient for building only to your own device for testing.
However, we recommend that you set up your Apple Developer account before proceeding because you will need it to use Unity to its full potential with iOS. This includes establishing your team, adding your devices, and finalizing your provisioning profiles. All this setup is performed through Apple’s Developer website. Since this is a complex process, we have provided a basic outline of the tasks that must be completed, which can be referred to alongside the step-by-step instructions at Apple’s iPhone Developer portal.
When you build the Unity iOS game an XCode project is generated. This project is required to sign, compile and prepare your game for distribution. See the Unity XCode project manual page for further information.
Unity provides a number of scripting APIs to access the multi-touch screen, accelerometer, device geographical location system and much more. You can find out more about the script classes on the iOS scripting page.
Unity allows you to call custom native functions written in C, C++ or Objective-C directly from C# scriptsA piece of code that allows you to create your own Components, trigger game events, modify Component properties over time and respond to user input in any way you like. More info
See in Glossary. To find out how to bind native functions, visit the plugins page.
The Unity iOS runtime allows you to download new content and you can use this feature to implement in-app purchases. See the downloadable content manual page for further information.
See the splash screen customization page to find out how to change the image your game shows while launching.
If you are experiencing crashes on the iOS device, please consult the iOS troubleshooting page for a list of common issues and solutions. If you can’t find a solution here then please file a bug report for the crash (menu: Help > Report A Bug in the Unity editor).
Unity supports importing a variety of source format sound files. However when importing these files (with the exception of tracker files), they are always re-encoded to the build target format. By default, this format is Vorbis, though this can be overridden per platform to other formats (ADPCM, MP3 etc) if required. MP3 playback offers slightly better performance on iPhone compared with Vorbis playback.
Unity iOS does not support DXT textures. Instead, PVRTCPowerVR Texture Compression (PVRTC) is a fixed-rate texture format that compresses textures to significantly reduce file sizes without causing a noticable reduction in image quality. More info
See in Glossary texture compression3D Graphics hardware requires Textures to be compressed in specialised formats which are optimized for fast Texture sampling. More info
See in Glossary is natively supported by iPhone/iPad devices. Consult the texture import settings documentation to learn more about iOS texture formatsA file format for handling textures during realtime rendering by 3D graphics hardware, such as a graphics card or mobile device. More info
See in Glossary.
We recommend you use the Video Player to play video files. This supersedes the earlier Movie Texture feature.