Just touring here to get the opinions of PM users specifically.
I'm going to share my experience here, working on creating an app for Android.
After most of the work appears to be solid and stable, then comes the moment when a form of beta of the app must be produced, debug or release, to get a quick idea of how things might be working on a limited number of varied devices. I must say that this is the part I hate the most because it pushes you right into the moment when you have the least amount of control on what goes on: the material even leaves Unity and moves into Android Studio (or else) and god forbid that you get errors outside of Unity.
The integration of several plugins making use, somehow, somewhere, of Google's libraries and services is a never ending ballad of dread and anxiety.
We're at a time when Unity is pushing for more tools to be migrated into the package group instead of assets, while Google continues to transfer developments cycles towards its androidx resources, all the while having to cover a greater range of APIs and exceptional conditions.
Maybe I am unlucky, but making all of this work seamlessly and compile properly has been a complete nightmare and Unity certainly fails to prove helpful here.
Take the Play Services Resolver which was phased out. Some old SDKs still get distributed with it and depending on how many times you have restarted Unity and checked (again) if there were any issues to solve, you might have vast amounts of pain awaiting you ahead of your quest for perfect app building.
Maybe this is a rant, I don't know. I'm not paying Unity yet, but I'd loathe to do so and face so many hurdles, errors and contrivances to use a tool that purports to simplify the production of apps. It looks more and more like bloatware. I have stopped counting the days literally lost looking for solutions on internet, some of them verging on the completely wild, and not counting the insane amount of things I have to learn instead of focusing on what I can do and like to produce.
How come Unity cannot solve duplicates on Androidx? How come it cannot even suggest doing something to solve this problem? How come when I resolve things and all seems to be working quite nicely before I press the Build&Run button, it turns out that several Unity sessions later, for some reason, without even changing assets, the resolver (when it works properly and doesn't suffer any conflict with its older version which was not named External Depency Manager and wasn't located in packages) is suddenly finding something in need of resolving, simply because I wondered, after getting several building errors and after several reboots, that maybe I might need to resolve something despite knowing that I regularly check for anything needing to be solved and Unity telling me that all is OK? How come I get Gradle sending me building failures even in the simplest Unity projects one can work on?
More importantly: Who codes such ****? It is absolutely depressing and I'm wasting precious days of work trying to remedy this.
I love using Playmaker, it's incredibly fun, powerful and intuitive, but I literally hate anything else around it and about Unity's way of handling all my work because I cannot focus on ideas, testing, prototyping, drawing, writing, etc. knowing that Unity is going to fail me so hard.
