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Addressables Experience

A record of my experience using Addressables in Unity.

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  • Unity
  • Addressables
  • Resource
Contents

Overview

This post summarizes what I analyzed through my own experience. If anything is incorrect, I’d really appreciate a correction!

Addressables was created to make the legacy AssetBundle package easier for developers to use.

When I only introduced AssetBundles into the project and measured the resource build time, it was certainly faster than Addressables… but AssetBundle required loading all dependencies alongside a single prefab by default, which meant writing all that raw logic yourself.

So after wandering around trying to figure out how to handle things, I decided to dig into Addressables.

How It Works

  • Inject an address into existing resources to register them as Addressables assets
  • Build the checked Addressables resources (you can see what assets exist via step 3 in the Setup section)
  • After building, a catalog.json file is generated, which records all assets and their versions
  • At runtime, calling Addressables.InitializeAsync reads the catalog.json and caches bundle metadata in memory
  • Then, referencing that metadata, Addressables.LoadAssetAsync loads the resource into memory, followed by Object.Instantiate
  • The AsyncOperationHandle returned by Addressables.LoadAssetAsync has a Release method to unload from memory — I cached these in a Dictionary and called Release + Remove when the asset was no longer needed
  • Not using Resources seems to result in significantly less memory allocation!

Versions Used

  • Unity 6000.3.9f1
  • Addressables 2.7.2

Setup

  1. After installing Addressables, designate a specific folder and mark all resources inside as Addressables assets
  2. Run the build
    • If there are script errors, the build won’t proceed
    • Each platform needs to be built separately
  3. In Window/Asset Management/Addressables/Groups, set PlayMode to Use Existing Build

Usage

I actually tried two approaches here.

Cache All Resources on Initialize

After calling Addressables.InitializeAsync, load all resources in the folder via LoadAssetsAsync and cache them in memory upfront.

Not having to worry about allocating and releasing individual resources was nice, but the timing of “cache everything” became a problem.

In the Editor, caching was nearly instant — no issues at all. But on Android and iOS, it took 15 seconds… sometimes up to 20 seconds. (Based on a project with ~1,500 files and ~250 MB.)

So…

Cache Resources On Demand

Just call the recommended LoadAssetAsync when you need a resource.

Clean and simple. There’s a reason this is the recommended approach. Since we’re doing it this way, make sure to handle the AssetHandle properly when you’re done with it.

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