Adobe AIR

A cost effective way to publish to many platforms from one code base

Didn’t have to retrain in new APIs

Could publish to both iOS and Android

Enabled us to take on some new projects

Was very little ROI as it was a free application for most of it's life

Allows easy porting of functionality and look and feel to many diverse platforms.

Shorten development and deployment time.

Reduced training and support costs by re-using common widgets.

It has helped us build better applications and quicker

It's a safe environment, great for entry-level programmers to get started and show their ideas.

Easy to get started, build and iterate.

However, at a certain point, Air applications can become unwieldy so for any serious project. We often would rather build it all outside of a middleware environment.

It's made creating training apps easier and the apps more portable, saving time. No need to create apps for each platform.

Since it enables us to use in house talent to create apps, we can save on some outsourcing.

Cost of the license is not too expensive compared to the alternatives.

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.

Adobe AIR was great for me because I had more experience with Flash and AS3 than any other programming environment.

I was able to use it for freelance jobs that earned fiscal income and programming experience.

It helped me carve out a niche and become a respected faculty member at the Academy of Art University.

Using Adobe AIR allows your team to be comprised of Flash/ActionScript 3 developers, which can be easy/cheap to find compared to other disciplines (based on location). This can lower the bottom-line in terms of engineering costs.

As the Adobe AIR SDK is free to use, the cost of entry is basically free. Additionally, the Adobe AIR SDK may be used in conjunction with a free IDE, such as FlashDevelop, making the entire stack completely free to use.

One negative impact is the stigma against Adobe Flash/AIR. Due to Adobe's less than stellar track record (in terms of support and security) with both Flash and Flash Mobile, there are numerous clients that we've dealt with, that refused to approve Adobe AIR as a tool.