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N
ncm123
Participant
October 20, 2016
Question

Future of Adobe Air

  • October 20, 2016
  • 6 replies
  • 4450 views

Hi,

I am building an extremely critical application in iOS and Android for our organisation. We have to support the application atleast for a period of 10 years.  Is adobe invested in the AIR platform for the long-term. I am afraid if they stop updating AIR after 2-3 years, we would have a big problem.

As it stands AIR is the best platform for our use-case as it supports flash animations directly. Plz let me know about the long-term viability of this platform.

Regards,

Adi

This topic has been closed for replies.

6 replies

N
ncm123Author
Participant
October 29, 2016

has anyone tried building windows store apps with air? i believe it can be done through the desktop app converter.

User Unknow
User Unknow
Legend
October 29, 2016

this was possible while MS not cancelled it I remember when Android App was executed on WP10 with Starling

natural_criticB837
natural_criticB837
Legend
October 29, 2016

Hey, I have thoroughly invested time for Windows 10 Desktop and Mobile converters. As Anton said, the Android Bridge was able to execute Air builds on Windows 10 mobile but has since been cancelled by Microsoft (and there were bugs, too). The Desktop Bridge is able to convert your desktop app to a Windows 10 Store for Desktop build, but it will not run on mobile. That means there is no way to deploy Air apps on Windows 10 mobile as of now and I agree it should not be added, the target market is way too small and declining.

    P
    piotrk92086443
    Inspiring
    October 28, 2016

    One of directions for ActionScript development is Javascript VM for SWFs... For example:  Shumway .

    Maybe it is also possible to do a cross-compilation from AS3/Flex to other engines such Unity3D.

    Z
    zwetan_uk
    Inspiring
    October 29, 2016

    Not a good direction, Shumway is dead

    see: BugZilla Bug 1243870 - Firefox Component Shumway is defunct. Move to Graveyard:Firefox Graveyard and close bugs in component (2016-01-28)

    and that's not the only one, another project Swiffy is dead too

    see: Google Ads Developer Blog Sunset of Google’s Swiffy tool (2016-06-15)

    you can read more about all that here
    Some Thoughts on the HTML Target for AIR

    I don't see why you would automatically assume that the only directions for ActionScript development
    would be to move to another platform like HTML5/JS or Unity3D ?

    The subject is about the "Future of Adobe Air" right ?

    Wether it is HTML5/JS, Unity3D or Adobe AIR, nobody can guarantee you that any of those tech will be still available in 10 years from now.

    P
    piotrk92086443
    Inspiring
    October 29, 2016

    Not a good direction, Shumway is dead

    Well.. Right.  Is almost closed project, but open sourced. Mature enough to run some games.  I've tested yesterday and Flex didn't work.

    Due to many limitations with even licenses for codecs I think that is not possible to rewrite full Adobe Air VM to JS.

    I don't see why you would automatically assume that the only directions for ActionScript development
    would be to move to another platform like HTML5/JS or Unity3D ?

    You are right.

    Let's face it... Flash Builder shows as news that "Adobe Flex 4.12 is released".  This news is from 10 Mar 2014.

    Support for Android and IOS is ok but on roadmap that should have also WP10.  And look at Unity3D supported platforms..

    Best,

    Piotr

    N
    ncm123Author
    Participant
    October 28, 2016

    Thanks for such detailed replies.

    I love adobe air and the low cost and fast development times that we get from it. That is the reason we have committed a lot of resources to make great games in adobe air.

    Do we have an update on the number of installs that adobe air apps have got till date? Also, 150k apps developed is not a small amount. Lets hope adobe keeps building on AIR.

    I had also read a post about the air team searching for beta testers for tvOS. Lets hope they launch there soon.

    User Unknow
    User Unknow
    Legend
    October 28, 2016

    AIR team today released new 24's Beta with tvOS support

    Colin Holgate
    Colin Holgate
    Inspiring
    October 28, 2016

    Can you say where you read that? The links to the release notes give 404 errors.

    N
    ncm123Author
    Participant
    October 24, 2016

    I thank you both for your replies. The reason I am concerned is that our particular app is animation intensive. Only flash/air seem to have the capability to handle animation at low weights in iOS / Android.

    I know that no one can guarantee anything for the next 10 years. AIR was launched in 2008-09 and has improved since then. How many applications and installs have adobe air apps got till now? This number might be critical to adobe persisting with the adobe air platform.

    A
    Anonymous
    October 24, 2016

    I concur with the other posts that expecting a software technology to be around in 10 years is not a reasonable expectation. Especially of an employer expecting the employee to maintain something for that amount of time without the possibility of complete re-writes or major changes. The only way you could feasibly have this expectation is that if your company has complete control over the devices that the app is being deployed to and are never allowed to update or are only allowed to update at the frequency of Adobe updating AIR to support the newest OSes from Apple and Google.

    As far as Adobe supporting the AIR platform, that all comes down to money and the cost of them continuing to support the AIR/AS3 team. As far as I know, Adobe makes no money directly from AIR. The only thing that really might make money from AIR is being able to point out iOS and Android apps hitting the Top 10 on downloads/purchases and hope that gets more Creative Cloud subscribers.

    Now if the animation capabilities of Flash are critical to the app, would it be possible to save out those animations as MOV files that are compressed in Adobe Media Encoder (or your encoding app of choice) and then use those movies in a native app? Trying to throw out a semi-solution.

      Z
      zwetan_uk
      Inspiring
      October 22, 2016

      Your question is rather puzzling and to me it makes no sense whatsoever.

      First, there is not a single technology stack out there which could guarantee you "oh yeah it still gonna be the same in 10 years from now", thing do changes, languages evolve, old framework dies, new framework arrives, server-side 3rd party services rise and dies too (parse for ex), etc.

      Second, there is not such thing as developing an app and not updating it over the years, you can not know in advance what gonna happen in the future, for ex: today there is Windows 8.1 and Windows 10, you don't know what gonna happen for a Windows 11 or 12 or 13 etc.

      Third, if your app is extremely critical then you have to assign critical resources to it, and that means assigning a team of dev that will not only develop the app but maintain it over the years, that include fixing bugs, adding features and yeah it could also mean switching technology stack in the middle of those 10 years.

      See it like that, if right now you were developing a server-side app in PHP 7, you might need to rewrite/update parts of it to adapt to new or deprecated stuff for PHP 8, that would be the same for any programming language and technology stack. people who develop PHP may have a vague idea of what gonna happen in the next version of PHP 8, but they are certainly have no idea of what's gonna happen for PHP 11.


      You can not seriously ask someone to guarantee something gonna still work for new stuff that does not exists yet and/or are not known yet.

      P
      piotrk92086443
      Inspiring
      October 22, 2016

      Hi,

      I'm not an Adobe employee, but for extremely critical apps I rather suggest use native solutions. S* happens and Adobe could stop developing Adobe Air or even Apple could stop support something... Good news is example of Adobe politics in case of Flex SDK.  Adobe moved Flex SDK to Apache open source and now is developed via open community.

      Best,

      Piotr

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