Unity Addressables: System Overview and Why It Exists

The traditional approaches for runtime dynamic loading in Unity have been the Resources folder and AssetBundles.

The Resources approach is extremely simple to use, but since all resources get bundled into the build output, it leads to increased app size and longer load times.

AssetBundles were introduced to address these issues, but they come with a steep learning curve and tricky dependency management — requiring significant care when organizing assets.

Addressables is the system designed to overcome these limitations.

Starting with Unity 2019.3, it's effectively included as an official feature. In 2019.2, you can install it via the Package Manager.

Conceptually, think of it like C/C++ pointers: "you reference and load assets by address (key)." That mental model makes the system much easier to approach.