Welcome to Friends

Explore the Friends service for managing player relationships and connections.

Read time 2 minutes

Last updated 8 months ago

The Friends service allows you to boost player engagement by providing players with a social system that works well with other Unity services. With Friends, your players can:

Send and receive friend requests.
Build and manage friend lists.
Block and unblock other players.
The user sends a message to a friend.

Environments are logical partitions of Unity Game Services that contain data associated with your project. You can set the target environment in the Unity Dashboard and your initialization scripts.

The Friends API uses JSON Web Token (JWT) authentication. The Authentication SDK supports Anonymous authentication and Platform-specific authentication.

Understanding Friends

The Friends service manages relationships of different types. In general, most user relationships don’t change often; however, there are updates users often want to know about as soon as possible. To increase efficiency, the Friends SDK fetches all a user’s relationships one time at startup, then keeps the list up-to-date using push notifications.

The SDK sends change notifications as soon as the changes occur. User relationship changes that trigger a push notification include:

A friend updates their presence status.
Updates to the presence state for an individual user.
The user adds a new relationship. A user creates a
```
FRIEND_REQUEST
```
relationship
.
The user removes a relationship, or a
```
FRIEND
```
relationship
is otherwise deleted.

The Friends service treats all relationships the same. You can use the various properties of each relationship to decide how to treat that relationship. Each relationship has one or more members (players), each of which might have extra properties that identify that member’s role in the relationship. For example, a

FRIEND_REQUEST

relationship always has two members:

A member with a
```
SOURCE
```
role (the sender).
A member with a
```
TARGET
```
role (the receiver).

However, the member's role changes to

NONE

when a

FRIEND_REQUEST

relationship changes to a

FRIEND

relationship.

The SDK provides some wrapper APIs for specific operations to increase the service’s usability.

For example, when you call the

SendFriendRequestAsync

method, it calls the

CreateRelationship

API and creates a new

FRIEND_REQUEST

relationship with the target user.

If there’s already a

FRIEND_REQUEST

relationship from the target user, it creates a new

FRIEND

relationship. Depending on the state,

SendFriendRequestAsync

can result in a

FRIEND_REQUEST

or a new

FRIEND

relationship.

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