Even though, they might just let it live the way it is, and if it is brought to the attention of shortsighted management they might decide to cut it off :S

D

DQvsRA

Known Participant

Once again, it's nonsense that multi-billion company can't afford to support 10-15 engineers team, it's a drop in an ocean, they have millions of CC subscriptions. I believe that smart people who respect technology community will keep AIR alive and find the way how to evolve it.

L

Leo Kanel

Inspiring

The problem is not they can't afford a small team. I guess the current team something like 5-10 people somewhere cheap (like india). The problem is they don't want to. They failed to make AIR a paid platform, like so many respected game engines, so they are delaying the inevitable until they figure out how it is going to play.

I would love to see AIR open source, like they did with Flex. The Flex community managed to complete the AS3 to HTML5/JS compiler in 4-5 years.

H

hferreira80

Inspiring

"The Flex community managed to complete the AS3 to HTML5/JS compiler in 4-5 years."

Where do you saw that ?

Are you talking about Royale ?

If so, it's still a alpha/beta product.

In a near future, perhaps.

P

PippoApps

Inspiring

Anyway, last month I filed 2 AIR bugs. AIR staff contacted me for both. On the most serious one they are working on a fix on next release, for the second one they offered a solution and asked me to check. All within 2 weeks. Not bad at all!

It could be better of course, but I am really happy about their response.

Ad maiora. Le keep our hopes.

A warm hug to all fellow AIR lovers.

I

ivanp2689695

Known Participant

IMO, Adobe took a bet on JS/HTML when they purchased Phonegap. They thought that'd be the future of a hybrid app development. Also, they couldn't work out a working and profitable licencing for AIR. I wonder why Adobe couldn't, since Unity with much less resources could figure out the model which benefited both the devs and the company.

PedroFernandezEteria

Participating Frequently

The decision of Adobe has more to do with synchronizing with the rest of the industry (html5) than having bought phonegap. Rather this second is the consequence of the first.

The difference between Unity and Adobe, is that the first ONLY sell that product, exclusively. Adobe has dozens of products to sell. Flash is "one more product".

From my point of view, Unity would not be in the current state of extension in the market, if Adobe had bet heavily by Flash / AIR / Stage3D over these years (we would be in a much more advanced state with 2D tools and 3D much more powerful).

They would have devastated the market because they had a technology that already worked very well and that was extremely widespread in the market. Unity would only have a "small niche". In Unity they had that great luck.

Apple also had that great luck. Because the latter, if not for the coward decision of Adobe, would have been forced to install the Flash plugin on their devices. Recall that what was established and widespread was Flash Player. The devices of Apple were a simple novelty (much slower than a computer of the time) that tried to integrate into the market.

The shareholders of Adobe, simply did not want to risk, nor wanted problems with the rest of the industry. Together they move the money they want, with the products they want.

You can call it "conspiracy," or "industry interests." But it has nothing to do with selling "what's best for people or for developers."

A

ASWC

Inspiring

You nailed it, Unity has simply done what Adobe didn't bother to do (and could have done easily) with its technological monopoly. Apple did not just kick Flash out of its devices but they also tried to kick out everything not XCode based (some here might remember this) including Unity and that did not go well at all, after only a couple weeks they had to reverse their decision following the threats of losing their entire market. Not such threat though about Flash mainly cos Adobe didn't know what to do and how to handle the situation. it was simply safer to not do anything and not care.

Lars Laborious

Legend

For what it's worth, I got a respons from Adobe on their Animate Facebook page when I asked them if they still care about AIR: "As far as I know, there has been no change to our plans for Adobe AIR. ^PK"

Hopefully someone from the Adobe AIR staff can confirm their ongoing commitment.

Z

zwetan_uk

Inspiring

Yep, the classic "business as usual" answer and it's good.

For AIR, business as usual means we will keep getting those quarterly updates.

We will get an update in March, and then in June, and another one in September etc.

For all the people that freaking out about the Android 64-bit updates, here my prediction (mark my words LOL)
and yeah I'm not related or connected in anyway to Adobe (I don't know or talk to any Adobe employees),
I have exactly zero insider information, but I can tell you that:

At the very least the AIR release of June 2019 will implement the Android 64-bit update,

just shy of 2 months from the official limit of August 2019 which will give plenty of time to update,

and yeah maybe there will be bugs, which then will be fixed by the next release in September 2019,
and that's the worst case scenario.

Let's see what happen

M

marcanw

Inspiring

Yeah something like that.

Now they are committed to the ios upgrade. Then they will take care of android 64. I guess if they didn't make it so far it's probably because it's not trivial. In the end we will have better performance on android which was a bit poor against ios. Surely new bugs and probably some old that will be gone.

As I said elsewhere I think the resources on Air are limited so they don't waste them babysitting users. Personally I prefer that they work on the code than on the forum...

P

PippoApps

Inspiring

I am not sure. I see a small but dedicated team probably somewhere in India, and a new AIR release every 3 months, which is great, and addresses the most important parts. It is not simple to keep up with a runtime for 4 entirely different OS, and they keep adding also new features. I think we can't ask for more. They do an amazing job considering Adobe keeps it in the basement.

MyFlashLabs and Distriqt make our life easier with ANEs, and they do deserve our support.

I do wish from the bottom of my heart that AIR continues to thrive for the years by, but yes a clear statement form Adobe would be great. Still I can't agree with pessimists neither with optimists.

Let's hope.

Cheers to fellows AS lovers.

D

DQvsRA

Known Participant

I don't understand why they don't sell it to someone who can continue to work on the technology maybe rename/rebrand it, make 3D engine and editor and sell it to other, like Unity did, how come they did it?

L

Leo Kanel

Inspiring

Who would buy this? Not a big user base, no revenue model, outdated, comes with a bit of bad reputation. With this in mind, the money they could get, is not enough to convince the shareholders / board it worth the effort.

natural_criticB837

Legend

Extremely mature technology with a dedicated and committed developer base and a heavily underdeveloped business model around it, who would not buy it? I think the potential is huge.

PedroFernandezEteria

Participating Frequently

The key to the issue must be analyzed globally. We can not just look at the first tree in the forest ("Adobe has stopped funding two open source projects").

Adobe has no real interest in the Flash / Adobe AIR ecosystem. If they continue updating it is because there are still some developers who use the technology, and not to cause a stir (and with it the possible loss of customers).

From my point of view Adobe was wrong with its decisions from 2011 to the present. What they did was go to the easy way. Follow the game to the rest of the industry, when they were the ones who had the winning horse already running on the track (they did not have a product that was "smoke" like html5 back then). They would have won for sure. But they (the shareholders) did not want to risk.

Therefore, what I think is that if by the shareholders of Adobe were, right now they would stop updating everything related to Flash, because they are spending money on a product that is actually free for developers. You have to remember that not only do they have to update the technology, but there are also a number of parts in the runtimes that Adobe has to pay in the form of licenses (eg: video), and that money has no return on investment for them.

I dont think they are going to stop updating it right now. I do not believe it at all. I sincerely believe that they will finish all the points of the last planning (eg: Android 64bits). But I also think that when they finish that, they will be a few years only updating it to work to the latest versions of android, ios, windows, mac, but from there they will cut forever.

This does not mean either that you should stop using Adobe AIR right now. We will continue using it for a series of projects, because it is the most agile development platform for them. And it will not stop working overnight. But it can mean that you have to start looking for other alternatives for the future.

In our development department we are analyzing several possibilities. Among others haxe / openfl. It is much simpler and similar to Flash / AIR / AS3 than any other solution on the market. For example, you can work with a similar workflow with swf's, which greatly facilitates the positioning of design elements without having to export a lot of images from a separate application and having to then program all that in a less agile development environment and workflow.

On the other hand, it is true that Haxe has a series of drawbacks for us:

- The first time you try it, it is complicated to start the whole environment to compile each platform.

- The fact that there is no multiplatform solution to integrate video, is something that throws us back. For us, the integration of video is very important, because we do not work as much in games as in interactive ones.

- Another problem is the tweening engines in haxe. There are very few. The most updated is Actuate, and it is not even remotely "greensock" (which we use for many projects in Adobe AIR). There are also no signs of porting greensock in the future. So there are few options in this regard ...

- There is much less information and code online. Fewer libraries.The problem of ANEs, etc.

As we commented in a thread of the starling forum: "Reinventing the wheel is one of the stupidities of the human being, and at least in the technological field it does so frequently ..."

Z

ZachBJ

Known Participant

"Reinventing the wheel is one of the stupidities of the human being, and at least in the technological field it does so frequently ..."

Couldn't agree more .

Despite Adobe's commitment and unresolved AIR bugs, it is totally HARD for me to find another toolkit that offer 'everything in balance' like AIR and Flash did. Thats why I stick with it.