Adobe AIR

Flexible Deployment

Solid API with AS3

Once had strong user base

No longer supported by Adobe

Dwindling user base

Lack of new functionality

Easy to learn

Works efficiently

Seamless integration

Adobe support (when it was still being updated)

Would have been nice to keep it supported

No updates in a long time

Not many tutorials on advanced features

Can no longer update it anywhere

Runs on Windows, Mac OS, Android and Apple iOS.

Allows developers to use tools such as Adobe Dreamweaver or Flash Professional and even text editor to develop an app.

Adobe AIR runtime and AIR SDK are free.

Android widgets are currently not supported in AIR.

Not all Adobe Creative Suite applications are compatible with AIR.

No support for desktop Linux.

Saves and stores documents and keeps organized

Crossplatform compatibility

Can build without code

Applications and secure and fast

There are not a lot of resources out there, even from Adobe

Not used a lot so not a lot of integrations

Difficult to learn at first

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.

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.

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 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.

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.