Air is Dead

For the past two years or so it has been clear for me and my company that AIR and Flash are slowly dying and we need to move away from that technology asap. Adobe has cut all real support to Flash and AIR and now those technologies live on momentum and are simply updated by the smallest teams up until everyone has moved on and they can finally pull the plug.

Is it not obvious that AIR will never support Windows Phone? Or any new technology coming to the mobile market (FireFox OS)? Adobe will never invest any money to support new platforms which is by definition the death of a cross platform technology.

Swift might facilitate the transition for many coder but whether you are an indie dev or a company my advice to you: don't wait too long to make the switch, it is just a matter of time now and maybe sooner than you think.

I totally agree with you that Air is great just as it is right now, never said anything else. But I am missing Adobe putting Air and Flash on their agendas. Last time I checked the talks on an Adobe conference, there was not a single mention of the entire technology. Same with the recent, largely discussed, annonouncement, that PhoneGap is Adobe's capital technology for cross platform development. I know it's an issue with the marketing strategy of Adobe. They should just allow their developers to talk openly to us instead of this marketing bullshit that has nothing to do with reality.

Again, I love Air, and I dont complain about anything I have right now. But I am worried that it might not stay like this. And definitely there are people moving away from Air because of this impression, which worries me as a general tendency. Even when it makes me wonder where they are moving to

Btw I read your link about multi screen development before, its a good one

Cheers

I do not think dropping SmartTVs was a bad move. Of course I would like to have as many platforms as possible, but better drop a platform no one uses (I dont know anyone who released anything there) than to waste precious resources you could use to develop more important stuff. But I do mind Adobe's communication strategy on these decisions.

I heard saying (this is not verified information) that King decided not to use Air, not because they felt the technology wasnt strong enough, but they didnt feel Adobe is committed to it for the next 5 years. What a sad reason to turn down an otherwise great platform.

Hi guys, I would like to join the discussion. I have mixed feelings about the Adobe Flash platform, as it's a great platform with an uncertain future.

I am an indie developer based in Berlin. I make a living of my currently 3 games with ~25.000 DAU. Using Air/Flash I now support the following platforms:

- Standalone Website

- Facebook

- Android

- iOS

- Amazon

- Blackberry

- Windows 8 Store (desktop certified apps, it works)

- PC Boxed Game (those offline things you can buy in a store)

I do not see a way I could support all these platforms if it wasn't for the Adobe platform. Also, from a developer perspective, I love it. Looking at other tools available, I do not see a vital alternative. There are lots of game developers (large companies and Indies) in Berlin. The indies mostly use Unity, and I would consider it my first option if it wasnt for Air. But despite all the hype, none of the Indies I know are making a profit.

When I talk to investors or Business angels, and we talk about technology, I often here phrases like "Oh you are using Air, yeah I wondered how you could have done that with PhoneGap/HTML5". Despite all the bashing, the experienced people know how good Air is. The bashing mostly comes from people working on web development that have no experience with games and take their knowledge from fellow HTML5 believers. That brings me to the major companies: 3 gaming companies in Berlin that I know quite well are using Adobe Air/Flash for their games. GameDuell, the largest, also use Native and HTML5, depending on the usecase, where they reserve their Air resources for the rich content applications. NeuroNation, a startup by some friends with a 7 digit funding also use Air for their app and got recently featured on iTunes. Crowdpark, a social casino company that I used to work for, are using Flash/Air for their Casino platform. That said, Air is all but dead. The question is, is it dying?

I do not mind having to develop / buy the ANEs, even if it's getting messy sometimes (getting Facebook login to work on Desktop required some serious voodoo). But I also feel that Adobe is slowly letting us down. I do not know what they plan, but if I was Adobe and I was planning to stop Air support while pocketing as much money as I could from it, I would do exactly what they are doing right now. After the official drop of Air for SmartTV I found recently a page on the official website by Adobe still stating "they are firmly committed to continue developing Air for SmartTV". I know what Adobe's committment is worth, now.

In my oppinion the dilemma is, that Air is a great platform, but there is not a lot of money to be made from it for Adobe. Their weird approach with premium features failed, whatever that was. The thing is, I would be willing to give them more money. I would gladly pay 1000€ for a Windows 8 Metro Air license, and many others, too. Why dont they try this, I can only wonder.

I really hope that Adobe continues to provide support for Air for at least the current existing platforms for the next 10 years. It is the best platform out there. The only thing missing is Adobe waving the Flag and lighting all beacons, showing they are alive and committed, not only saying that from time to time.

Sorry for the long post, potatoe

Friend!! xamarin wins today! forget the nightmare html5 + javascript + phonegap

XAMARIN 3!

Anyway, I used phonegap/Cordoba recently ... is really shit.

Hello guys,

I would like to share my humble opinion and experience with you related the topic. I'm working with flash and actionscript for the last 10 years. I've done everything from simple banner animations to complex websites and games. I've had a lot of trouble in some cases as most of you of course but I've grown to love the platform very very much. So as expected when I read the posts about the death of flash some years ago I was devastated. Until I read what was the case exactly... Adobe have stopped the support the support for mobile browsers for the flash player... I was like 'Who cares???'. Nobody was doing flash for mobile anyway. At the point the AIR platform was already on its way to mobile and that's where I was looking at. So I didn't really paid much attention to the 'death' news and kept digging and working with Adobe AIR. At first I had some worries about the performance. It was terrible and I really had my doubts about the future of flash. Then Stage3D appeared (not without a huge effort from Adobe as you might imagine) and the sun was shining again. Then Starling and Feathers came and some other VERY WELL maintained frameworks. So I've started playing with it. We even got an order to create an Android version of one of their games (not very complicated but lots of animations and gestures). We did it in AIR. The result was a perfectly running game with amazing performance on every device we have tested it on. What was interesting for me was to give the client the iOS version from our AIR build and compare it to their native one - the game was running so much smoother nobody could believe it. Of course the native app was not very well created and such but the point still stands. Since that moment we have started doing most of our mobile business apps and games on AIR. We do have some native apps because of clients requests but still I see no point in that. Currently we have three very big games close to release that are completely created on AIR + Native Extensions. All of them will be release at the same time for iOS phones and tablets, Android phones and tablets and Web in a single code base with some compiler conditions in the different modules. There were some problems and some bugs on various devices but nothing so far we couldn't overcome will a bit of brainstorming and some well planned coding. There is NO SINGLE FEATURE to this point of the development that we couldn't do. Nothing seen on other games cannot be done. We have in-app payments, social integration, tons of animations, amazing graphics, great particle effects and lots more. The memory management was tricky but not impossible. The game currently runs pretty well even on iPhone 3GS... I promise to share the games as soon as they are release in the next few weeks so you can understand my point completely.

So to generalize my point of view here:

1. AIR is far from dead because at the moment it's one of the best cross platform technologies especially for games.

2. It is true that the last few updates of the platform were not something spectacular but they fixed some problematic limitations and gave us a much more stable framework. The truth is at the moment there's not THAT MUCH stuff to add. There are missing features and problematic stuff (like the video playback for certain formats) but there are ways to make them work very well even now. There's nothing extremely new to the native sdks too. No big new features that someone would NEED in their app. And if there is a simple native extension is a much faster approach then doing the app/game in three different languages.

3. On the Flash side - for games flash is the KING and that's a fact. There are literally millions of flash games on the market and every new game we see on facebook or other gaming sites is Flash. Yeah I have seen Angry Birds done in HTML5. But there are few people in the world who can do that kind of HTML5.

4. There are some features in an app or a game that are times easier to be done in AIR than native. I have knowledge and experience in both Objective-C and Java and I have done some nice stuff there but there were moments I would have killed myself over something that would take me hours to do native but I could have done for 10 minutes in AIR.

5. ALTERNATIVES:

- Native - much slower, can't really see why I should choose it unless the whole app I have to make is build on extremely native functionalities. For iOS I would need to by a Mac machine.

- Unity - great platform I would say. BUT for 3D and for big GAMES. To create a small 2D game with Unity instead of Flash would take much more time and nerves. It is paid.

- Titanium - good for small business apps that have nothing unusual. It is extremely ease to use for this type of projects and a great alternative. But for something more complicated you'll get stuck. There are limitations that won't allow you to make anything you want to. Also not very good for games. As far as I remember - it's free.

- Corona - I don't have any experience with this one but as far as I have read pretty much the same case as Titanium.

- HTML5 - for me to say that HTML5 is anything close to AIR is a complete joke. This is my opinion. It is great for new interactive and interesting animated websites for all platforms. And that's about it. It has major performance issues. It's impossible to make anything work fine on every possible device, browser and OS. Even if you do it will take weeks and huge amount of cheating in the code with tons of if/else statements for each platform. Creating big complicated games with HTML5 is close to impossible for the regular developer and it is extremely hard to provide decent security, stability and bug free environment overall.

So at the end at that point Adobe AIR is the ultimate cross-platform solution for me. Of course that's my opinion and everyone is free to use whatever they want. But I just wanted to point the reasons I love the platform and why I'll keep using it for the years to come.

Have a great day you all and build amazing apps and games no matter what you use

Ico

http://www.khaledgarbaya.net/open-letter-to-adobe-and-adobe-air/

I think adobe should make a serious explanation about Flash Runtime.

AIR should not die..

Why do people keep posting in this thread?

Adobe guys came by and replied, "flash not dead, because we have some air apps in app stores". Do you expect them to change this statement just because you don't agree with it? Or maybe you think some big guy at Adobe gets to read your post and be like "jesus, this guy is right, we need to throw more money at flash"? Neither is going to happen. Just stop.