Today’s mobile developer must engage customers with app experiences that run across an array of devices and platforms yet remain responsive and powerful.  The AWS Mobile SDK can help bring the power of the cloud to your apps while enabling you to build high quality mobile apps quickly and easily across multiple platforms including iOS, Android and Fire OS. 

AWS recently launched an update to the AWS Mobile SDK for Unity developers. The developer preview of AWS Mobile SDK for Unity helps your games handle cloud storage along with identity and user state management directly from within the Unity developer environment. The AWS Unity SDK contains a set of .NET classes that enables games written with Unity to utilize AWS services. Supported AWS services currently include: Amazon Cognito, Amazon S3, and Amazon DynamoDB. The AWS Unity SDK also contains sample code that illustrate how to call AWS services from a Unity Game. The AWS Mobile SDK for Unity is compatible with Unity 4.0 and onward, and supports both Free and Pro versions.

My colleague, Mudeem Siddiqui, elaborates more on some of the key benefits here:

Safeguard AWS credentials: When you use Amazon Cognito, your game is provided with temporary, limited-privilege credentials that it can use to access AWS resources. This means your game can access the resources it needs and that you can follow security best practices by not hard-coding credentials.

Store and sync across devices: Amazon Cognito allows you to store user data for your games, such as user preferences and game state, in the Amazon Cognito sync store. You can then sync this data across a user’s devices to help make their experience consistent across their devices. Amazon Cognito can automatically send a silent push notification to a user’s devices when data in the sync store changes so you can synchronize the latest data right away.

Store game assets in the cloud: With Amazon S3, you can store your game’s assets such as images and videos in the cloud and download them at run time. This reduces the size of your game’s binary, thereby avoiding the AppStore Over the Air download limit.

Store game data in a NoSQL database: You can store your game data that is shared across users in Amazon DynamoDB, a NoSQL database that offers high throughput, and low-latency at any scale.  

For more information on the AWS Mobile SDK for Unity check out the following links:

• Download the AWS Mobile SDK for Unity 
• Getting Started Guide
• Get Started with Amazon Cognito Sync
• Get Started with Amazon S3
• Get Started with Aamazon DynamoDB
• AWS Mobile SDK for Unity GitHub Repo
• AWS Mobile SDKs for Unity Samples GitHub Repo

If you haven't registered for an Amazon Appstore account yet, you can create a free developer account here and immediately get started testing your app on Fire devices. For more information about getting started with Amazon Fire devices and the Amazon Appstore, check out the following free resources:

• Amazon Mobile Apps and Services Developer Portal
• Amazon Mobile App SDK
• Amazon Fire TV and Fire TV Stick SDK
• Amazon Fire Phone SDK
• Introduction to Unity Part 1: Unity’s IDE
• Introduction to Unity Part 2: Learning C#
• Setting Up In-App Purchasing in Unity

-Dave (@TheDaveDev)