Weekly iOS 64-bit and Metal update

We've been hard at work stabilizing and optimizing iOS 64-bit support in Unity 4.6 and 5.0 and given that this is of interest to such a large percentage of you, wanted to begin giving everyone weekly blog updates on progress. Our Sustained Engineering and QA teams have really stepped up the pace of testing and releasing in order to allow us to ship both 4.6 and 5.0 patch releases each week which means we’re making improvements and shipping bug fixes at an extremely rapid pace at this point. We highly recommend that all production teams working toward releasing iOS 64-bit titles adopt every patch release as it ships.

All patch releases for 4.6 and 5.0 can be found at https://unity3d.com/unity/qa/patch-releases.

All monthly maintenance releases for 4.6 and 5.0 can be found at http://unity3d.com/get-unity/download/archive

For reference and more context about what is going on with iOS 64-bit and Apple’s requirements, please check out the blog post on iOS & ARM64 here, and our in-depth strategic plan for IL2CPP here.

So without further ado, here’s the status update:

Status of 64-bit/Metal support in Unity 5.0.x

• 5.0.1 shipped Wednesday, April 1st. This release includes il2cpp and other iOS fixes but does not contain build size improvements.  The first set of build size improvements will be included in the next patch release, 5.0.1p1.

• Download Unity 5.0.1 at https://unity3d.com/get-unity/update

Status of 64-bit/Metal support in Unity 4.6

• Unity 4.6.4p1 shipped Wednesday, April 1st.  In addition to a long list of il2cpp fixes, it contains new WebRequest fixes and first set of build size improvements.

• Download Unity 4.6.4p1 at https://unity3d.com/unity/qa/patch-releases/4.6.4p1

Our current release plan

• 5.0 patch releases are scheduled to be released each week on Wednesdays.

• 4.6 patch releases are scheduled to be released each week on Fridays.

Last week's release was accelerated due to the seasonal holidays on Thursday and Friday. The regular Friday schedule for 4.6 releases will resume this week.  Also as a result of the holiday schedule, the first 5.0.1 patch release will be released on April 15 and the weekly patch release cadence for 5.0 will continue from then on.

Some important information to remember

• It is necessary to update your projects to 4.6 at the very least to enjoy 64-bit support on iOS. 64-bit will only ship in 4.6.x and 5.x releases.

• Apple has announced that they will require all apps on the store to include 64-bit support with any updates as of June 1, 2015.

• We are doing weekly releases with all bugfixes. We can’t fix bugs if they’re not reported, so please report any issues with il2cpp builds the moment you discover them.

• Internally, our developers collaborate on a single version of IL2CPP which is ported to 4.6 and 5.0 -based patch release branches at the last possible moment in order to release as many fixes and improvements as possible in each release. The cutoff date for fixes in each weekly patch release is several days before the release, to give us time to test and approve each release.

About the binary size increase issue

We’re aware of the issue and have been working hard behind the scenes to address increased runtime executable file sizes when using il2cpp, and have made enough progress that we can now begin releasing the improvements. The first set of those improvements in Wednesday's 4.6.4p1 release with additional improvements to follow.

WebRequest performance and stability

The WebRequest APIs have been a significant cause of performance and instability problems for a number of customers over the past several weeks. We have been, and will continue to, fix every bug and performance issue (as reported to us) as quickly as possible.

We’ll be working on providing these updates regularly on the blog so make sure to check back each week to get a heads up on the latest progress with 64-bit iOS support and il2cpp.