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It's a great middleware solution for designing an app that is compatible with many devices that can pass relatively quickly through QA. We like to use it for developing applications for desktop use that aren't too heavy. Allows for fast, scaleable iterating.
- Easy to develop for, skills for programs such as Adobe Animate and basic backend translate well to the program.
- Stable across multiple different platforms.
- Can get a working prototype really quickly
- 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.
April 17, 2017
We use Adobe AIr to create simple training modules for our sales people and sales associates that include text and animation. The modules are structured much like games, which is part of why we chose AIR to create them. It enables us to get training content to both new hires and existing staff in a way that is a bit more fun than the typical training material.
- Cross-platform functionality. Apps can work on different operating systems.
- Easy to convert existing applications.
- Very good support and documentation.
- The technology is proprietary, and running apps created on AIR depend on Adobe's runtime to work.
- It updates a little too often, but this is typical of Adobe in general.
- No Windows phone support, as far as I can tell.
June 07, 2016
I've used Adobe AIR to create hybrid/cross-platform apps and games that needed to run on Android, iOS, and desktop/kiosk devices. Using AIR allowed our team to stay within the Adobe suite (Illustrator, Flash, Photoshop), and also provided an easy way to build for multiple platforms with a single code base. This addresses the business problem of managing multiple versions of the same project, and helps keep assets standardized (due to integration with Adobe Creative Suite/Cloud).
- 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.
- Over the course of months/years, various security exploits and other issues are discovered and patched in AIR, often requiring you to rebuild and resubmit mobile apps to the various storefronts. This happens often enough that it's worth mentioning as a major con.
- While development on Adobe AIR seems to be fairly constant, there is very little communication between the community and Adobe regarding the future and general support of AIR. The track record of Flash (and particularly Flash Mobile) does not inspire much confidence that Adobe intends to support Flash/AIR for years to come.
- Adobe AIR does not seem to perform as well (in terms of raw performance, memory usage, framerates, responsiveness, etc.) as other hybrid solutions for certain tasks. For example using shaders tends to be experimental still, and graphic/animation intensive projects often require the use of third party frameworks such as Starling.
June 10, 2016
I previously taught Adobe AIR to students interested in making mobile game apps. I also occasionally use it when making my own video game apps on the side. However, I now teach Unity and tend to use that technology for side projects as well. It's just easier to use and tends to have better performance.
- Adobe AIR supports a lot of commonly needed features for mobile app development.
- It is fairly stable and consistent once you learn how to use it.
- It is cross-platform and is supported by some useful third-party plugins.
- It is cumbersome to update if you use Flash Builder.
- It still relies on Flash and vector graphics and therefore can have poor performance unless you are using a third-party library such as Starling.
- It is updated somewhat slowly and is still missing some useful features such as controller support.
June 17, 2016
Adobe Air is no longer being used by Disney Interactive. In the past, it was used to quickly build and release high quality games for iOS and Android mobile platforms. Starting two years ago, Disney caught wind that Adobe Air was no longer going to be supported by Adobe in a capacity that we felt was worth our investment. At the same time, both Apple and Unity dropped support for Flash, and we made the executive decision to completely switch our tech stack over to Unity, as it offered much better support and arguably better performance for about the same level of time investment.
- Adobe Air helped us very quickly build and iterate on games for both mobile and web.
- Adobe Air gave our artists good integrated tools and a pipeline to make high quality 2D static and animated assets that were relatively easy to get into the game.
- Adobe Air allowed us to deploy to both Android and iOS platforms with relative ease, without needing to have an Apple laptop to build from.
- Adobe Air - at the time - was extremely difficult to get into in a non-professional sense. The industry standard tools for Air (Flash Builder and Flash Professional) were far too expensive to warrant purchasing as an independent developer wanting to try the technology. At the same time, Unity Free version provided a very easy way for curious developers to explore their tech with relatively few strings attached. As a result, it became increasingly more easy for us to find talented Unity engineers than Flash engineers, especially with the industry basically predicting the imminent death of Flash.
- Adobe Air's iOS crash logs were almost completely useless for debugging. Because Air used its own iOS compiler (which admittedly DID give us the ability to build iOS games without a Mac), symbolicating crash logs for Air apps gave you nothing of use whatsoever. As a result, a lot of crash bugs on our end (mostly caused by native extensions) went unfixed for the lifetime of our products.
- On the subject of native extensions - they were absolutely horrible to write and debug in Air mobile. There was VERY little documentation regarding how to build and maintain native extensions. As a result, being the engineer assigned to native extensions was about as exciting as being the janitor assigned to cleaning the toilets at Taco Bell.
Adobe AIR Scorecard Summary
What is Adobe AIR?
Categories: .Net Development
Adobe AIR Technical Details
| Operating Systems: | Unspecified |
|---|---|
| Mobile Application: | No |