Seasons greetings to you all! We promised in 2016 that we would support 5.3 as a stable release for a year. Your feedback showed that it was the right decision in the right direction. So, we’re happy to extend the same to our present and future Unity releases. That is, we are supporting all Unity releases with patch and rolled up public releases for one full year from the release date of each of the versions.

As of today, there are three versions, 5.5.x, 5.4.x & 5.3.x, being supported with patch and public releases. We propose to extend the support to all three versions for 12 months from the time each version is shipped. However, this can only be sustained with reduced frequency of patch releases starting with the latest release. We are looking at weekly, fortnightly (every other week) and monthly releases for the three versions mentioned above, in that order. The same cycle will apply when a new version is released.

Weekly patches and monthly public releases for the current release 5.5.x

Fortnightly patches and public releases after four patches, for 5.4.x

Monthly patches and public releases after four patches for 5.3.x

As 5.3.0 was first shipped about year ago and since we promised to support it for a year at GDC 2016, the final public release will be 5.3.8, scheduled to go live in March 2017, just after GDC.

The cycle will look like this when 5.6.0 goes live:

Weekly patches and monthly public releases for 5.6.x

Fortnightly patches and public releases for 5.5.x

Monthly patches and public releases for 5.4.x

Note that the rolled up public releases will be shipped after 4 patch releases.

The release plan may (but not necessarily will) look something like this:

Week LATEST RELEASE PREVIOUS RELEASE OLDER RELEASE 1 5.6.0p1 5.4.5 PUBLIC RELEASE 2 5.6.0p2 5.5.2p3 3 5.6.0p3 4 5.6.0p4 5.5.2p4 5 5.6.1 PUBLIC RELEASE 5.4.5p1 6 5.6.1p1 5.5.3 PUBLIC RELEASE 7 5.6.1p2 8 5.6.1p3 5.5.3p1 9 5.6.1p4 5.4.5p2 10 5.6.2 PUBLIC RELEASE 5.5.3p2 11 5.6.2p1 12 5.6.2p2 5.5.3p3 13 5.6.2p3 5.4.5p3 14 5.6.2p4 5.5.3p4 15 5.6.3 PUBLIC RELEASE 16 5.6.3p1 5.5.4 PUBLIC RELEASE

The same approach will be followed even after moving to the new version numbering system or licensing model. To re-iterate, we are committed to supporting each and every Unity releases for 12 months after their public launch so that we can ensure that Unity remains a stable platform for shipping your projects.Finally, note that there will not be any releases during the holiday period from December 23, 2016. And the weekly patch releases will commence in the new year from January 11, 2017.