How do I catch this when it only happens for some players?

Capture it automatically from the player's device with the full stack trace, the device and OS, the build, and a breadcrumb trail of what they did. That turns a vague complaint into a specific, reproducible issue you can fix without owning the hardware it happens on.

How to Fix Unstable Flickering Plane Detection in Unity AR Foundation

Q: What causes unstable flickering plane detection in Unity AR Foundation?

Poor lighting or featureless surfaces give the tracker too few feature points, so planes are re-estimated each frame and flicker or fragment.

Quick answer: Improve lighting and texture in the scene, slow the scan, and let the ARPlaneManager merge subsumed planes so geometry settles before you place content.

AR Foundation builds planes from visual feature points detected by ARCore or ARKit. On blank, glossy, or dim surfaces there are too few features, so the plane estimate jitters, splits into pieces, and flickers. Better lighting and giving the tracker time to converge produce stable planes.

How to fix it

1. Improve tracking conditions

Ask the user to scan a well-lit, textured surface slowly; blank tables and low light starve the feature tracker.

2. Let planes merge

Keep the ARPlaneManager running so smaller planes are subsumed into larger ones, and read boundaryChanged only after the plane stabilizes.

3. Wait for convergence

Delay placing content until tracking state is Tracking and the plane has persisted for a short time, rather than on the first detection frame.

Catching the ones you can't reproduce

The hardest version of this to fix is the one you can't reproduce — it only happens on a player's hardware, OS, driver, or save state, under conditions that simply aren't present on your machine. A report that says “it crashed” or “it froze” gives you nothing to act on, so the bug survives release after release while quietly costing you players.

Automatic error capture closes that gap. Each failure arrives with its full stack trace, the device and OS, the build number, and a breadcrumb trail of what the player did right before it broke, so even a failure you have never seen becomes a specific, reproducible issue. Fold identical failures into one signature ranked by how many players each hits, and your worklist sorts itself worst-first instead of arriving as a stream of vague complaints.

This is where a tool like Bugnet earns its place. Its SDK captures every mobile error automatically with the full stack trace plus device, OS, memory, build, and game-state context, folds duplicates into one grouped issue with an occurrence count, and ties each to the build it first appeared on — so you fix the problem that hurts the most players first and confirm it is gone when its signature disappears from the next release.

The errors you never hear about are the ones quietly costing you players. Visibility turns them into a worklist.