The first, no doubt, of many little stumbling blocks I will encounter: my enthusiasm for creating archival interfaces was significantly dampened by my foiled first attempts to build and run a demo VR app on my phone (not to mention some generally buggy performance on the Daydream View headset before we came to an undisclosed mutual agreement). Here, I share the solution I found in the hopes of sparing others of the same frustration:

After having set up my development environment according to the instructions provided by Google and Unity, I received an “Unable to List Target Platforms” error message upon trying to send my app to my phone.

Cutting to the chase, the solution can be found here, with heaps of gratitude to the ‘augmentedVR’ user who posted it with a concise explanation of the issue; basically, there are compatibility issues between newer installs of Unity and the Android software development kit (SDK) so that you have to downgrade your version of the SDK tools (or, at least, fool Unity into thinking that you have downgraded them).

Note: you may also need to install Java development kit (JDK) 8 and update the JDK path in the ‘External Tools’ tab under ‘Preferences’ in Unity.

In solidarity.