Adobe AIR vs Microsoft Silverlight

• 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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• Easy to implement
• No need for additional frameworks on client side
• Out of browser capabilities

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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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• Sometimes crashes
• Video recording functionality would be ideal

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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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• Quick development - low cost
• Quick development - quick implementation
• Quick development - easy for scrum development

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