Android Webview Texture is over

On October 2016 I started to learn VR, it was trending, and I wanted to understand the technologies behind it.
I bought a Google Pixel + Daydream headset (around 700€ at that time) and I started a blog post series to log everything: /blog/vr

It was quite an experience!

Idea and building

I had to start from scratch as I never did any 3D related things before.
So I decided to use Unity and everything went quite smooth.

At some point I wanted to get a Webview into one of my experimentation, but I was unable to find something working on the Unity Asset store.

I look all over the Internet for some tricks but nothing existed.
Thanks to a lot of patience, learning and reading (and thanks to Oculus and Felix for inspiration), I built a working Webview Texture using OpenGL shared_id
this is a technical detail that means that is stayed fast, unlike others ways of doing.

At that time I wanted to monetize one of my side project, not to be rich, but to learn that part of the “indie hacker” life and also to get experience in the complete process from sales to support.

I spent about 6 weeks building the asset, that’s a lot of time, but I was learning so let’s say it should have been something like 3 weeks for a person who knew Unity/OpenGL.

Finally, I created a Unity Asset on the Unity store.

Publish and support

I put in place a support web page, so people can contact me easily (here)
and I tried to work on the message in the assets store, tuning the title / description / images and price, so it gets more traction.

Then of course I did updates and support.
I made 5 releases fixing bugs and adding documentation and examples.

I received something like 150 emails related to that project, some were “thank you” or trivial support, but others needed many back and forth, time and concentration.
I even sometimes dive in others people’s project to check what was wrong.

On the support side I would say I did a premium support (and the review on the asset store agrees), the asset itself get a 4 out of 5 stars for 7 reviews.
The only bad reviews were people that did not contact the support before complaining, everyone else were very happy about the asset and the support.

Money

Today the asset has been online for 7 months and this is the full sale report:

{:.table .table-bordered} |-----------|--------|------|

Unity take 30% so I got 552.28€ on my bank account (full report)

Conclusion

Of course all this was an experiment and I learned a lot about people, support and pricing, but now it is time to move on for me, as this is clearly not profitable and also VR seems down a little (AR will take prevalence).

Today I’m focusing on something else: I’m stopping that experiment.

I may disappoint few of my users, but this asset had limitation anyway and the Unity Editor is iterating so fast that it is hard to follow (3 versions in the last 7 months).
As this asset is very low level any little change in Unity may break it, it is safer to remove it.

I’m quite sure people will find a replacement.
Please contact me if you have a candidate