Unity Patch Release Plan

Unity 5.1.4 will be the last public release for Unity 5.1. It will contain all previous patches, 5.1.3p1, 5.1.3p2 and 5.1.3p3. With the release of 5.2.0 on 8th September 2015, the active patch cycle has switched to the 5.2 version. The next patch release will be 5.2.0p1. It is important to note that 5.2.0 includes fixes only up to 5.1.2 while the new patch 5.2.0p1 will include all changes added up to 5.1.3p3. In other words, 5.2.1 public release will include all previous releases up to 5.1.4. Since 5.2.0p1 contains a lot of bug fixes that were not included in 5.2.0, we will ship the 5.2.1 public release soon after the release of 5.2.0p1.

The planned public release of 5.2.1 will in principle contain all bug fixes from 5.2.0p1 and may also contain a few additional fixes if and only if necessary. 5.2.x patches will be shipped every week until 5.3.0 goes live. We’ll do our best to ship these patches on Wednesdays. In addition, there will be a public release every month, i.e after approximately every four weekly patch releases. The same cycle will be followed for 5.3 patches when 5.3.0 goes live at its planned future date.

Finally, we will stop shipping Unity 4.6 patches or public releases after the end of December 2015. It is important to focus our energy on improving Unity and hence all efforts will go into Unity 5. You may have noticed that the frequency of 4.6 patch releases has gone down to every two weeks. There will be a 4.6.x patch release every other Friday and a we’ll ship a public release every two months until the end of December 2015.

We are also adding more developers to Sustained Engineering team with the focus of fixing more bugs as well as improving the overall quality of Unity. Our primary focus is to fix bugs in a quick turnaround time. We also monitor the forums and react to feedback when new releases (public or patch) go live. We have several more initiatives in the works. We’ll publish more blogs about these initiatives in due course.