Adobe AIR vs Apache Flex

• Smooth transition from Flash/Actionscript 3, and ability to port older Flash projects to AIR with little to no code changes.
• Ability to integrate custom and third party native extensions (ANE files) provides access to hardware and other APIs otherwise only exposed via native java/obj-c/swift.
• Ability to code and test within a single IDE (Flash / Flash Builder / Flash Develop) makes it extremely easy to set up a project and development environment. The ability to use the Flash timeline is a huge advantage when doing animation.
• The abundance of AS3/Flash examples and tutorials online provide a vast resource compared to other hybrid solutions.

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• Highly advanced UI platform, well suited for building enterprise applications.
• Cross browser issues do not exist as it runs the same on every browser via Flash Player.
• Animations are something that comes out of the box.

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• Adobe Air applications are taxing on a user's CPU, especially considering how simple a lot of the apps are.
• Updating and installing Air based applications is very user unfriendly, often asks for updates that are aggressively pushed to the front of the user.
• As HTML 5 has gotten more and more sophisticated, for basic things a lot of times browser-based apps make a lot more sense.

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• It's heavy as it needs to load the Flash plugin first before rendering anything to the user.
• Not future ready as there is no support for mobile and tablet platforms.

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• Disney Interactive ended up ultimately having to pivot drastically to switch entirely over to Unity for our tech stack due to lack of support for Air. During this transition, we lost a huge amount of good talent, and were forced to shutter many projects.
• Prior to the switch to Unity, Air allowed us to quickly port several web games to mobile after overhauling the graphics to be bitmap rather than vector based.
• Air allowed a small number of our developers to be able to transition to mobile before the elimination of all web flash positions.

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• Our users have a great positive feedback from the UI point of view.
• The ease of use of the application had doubled our existing user base.

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