In Unity, when building for the Windows Phone 8 (UNITY_WP8), the navigation bar on the bottom is not hidden by default

Question

Quick note that I am making this thread as I could find no similar threads or answers and felt the need to document this.

Problem:

When building with Unity 5.2, in my case, for the Windows Phone 8 (not WSA) the game did not hide the navigation bar, with the back, menu and search buttons. This is a problem if the user's device does not have the navigation bar as hardware buttons.

You can then not hide the buttons after the game launches, causing it to always block the lower part of the screen in portrait mode.

The plugins I am currently using only support WP8, and not WSA, so upgrading was not a choice until the plugins I used release a new version with support for WSA.

Answer 1

Solution:

1. Open WMAppManifest.xml from the compiled solution created by Unity.
2. On the <App> tag, change the Genre tag to apps.games.

Example:

<App xmlns="" ProductID="{XXXXXX-XXXXXXXX-XXXXXXX-XXXXXX}" Title="My Game" RuntimeType="Silverlight" Version="1.0.0.0" Genre="apps.games" Author="Alex" Description="" Publisher="Alex" PublisherID="{XXXXXX-XXXXXXXX-XXXXXXX-XXXXXX}">

This will result in the Windows Phone hiding the navigation bar and notifiying the user that they can bring up the navigation bar by swiping upwards from the bottom of the screen.