It took me some time to fit it in, but I have finally rebuilt Loan-U-Later as a Unity app, and the Android build is now available on Google Play.
Unity for a UI based utility app, what is this lunacy, you say? In the past, I’ve used Unity’s UI for simple menus and gameplay UI, but stayed away from more complex layouts, so I wanted to see what Unity’s UI could do and am decently happy with it. There are some drawbacks, though.
Probably the most significant one is that the UI is entirely part of Unity’s graphics engine, and very rarely uses native UI elements, so any services or functionalities that the OS provides for free with native UI are not available. One such example is accessibility; Unity’ UI does not support native accessibility functions, TalkBack for Android and VoiceOver for iOS, so they just don’t work – there is a plugin available to mimic this, but I have yet to implement it. For some other functionalities, such as alerts, I utilized the great asset Cross Platform Native Plugins.
Another hurdle was the limited options of include UI elements. I ended up either having build my own, or modify included or 3rd party elements to fit my needs. Some examples of this are the tab and table views. Due to the nature of this app, I was able to avoid the issues related to interacting with the native keyboard.
Anyway, there is a bit of backwards compatibility to handle before I can update the iOS version, but it will be coming in the near future. Enjoy!
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