Air 20 Performance Issues

[little fat girl]

I actually haven't deployed an iOS app since Air 16 about this time last year. But I needed to update an app, so i downloaded Air 19 and 20.

The performance on my new iPhone6s is predictably fine. But on my iPad3 and iPhone4s, it's really bad. I was able to get a pretty solid 30fps on the 4s before with Air 16, but now it easily drops and bobs in the low 20's with any kind of touches or drags. I even disabled some functionality to speed things up and it still lags.

I would love to just go back and use Air 16.  However, my ANE's have updated to more recent versions. And even if they had not, I need things to run on iOS9 and give iPad Pro icons and Default screens to be accepted on the AppStore.

I develop kids apps for 5 and under. Therefore, my target market uses mostly old hand-me-down devices. Flurry tells me these days that the iPad2 is the most common device among my users. So it's important for me to support old devices.

And also, while the decision to move from iOS 6.1 to 7.0 makes sense statistically, it is a little disconcerting to those of us who are still targeting these older devices. I appreciate the focus on keeping Air relevant and moving forward. But I hope we could still hang on to the functionality we need to support these older devices. I think these devices and old os's will be around for a few years more - especially in my category of "5 and under".

I post this mainly to let Adobe know that good performance on old devices is still very important to certain segments of this community. Our app has been featured in the AppStore for the past year (in several places). We are doing our best to make Flash and Air look like a solid development choice. Please help us do that.

I also post this to ask if anyone else had issues and if they had any new tricks in squeezing some more performance out of Air.

[deesharm]

Hi,

We are investigating it further.

Could you please share a sample project at deesharmATadobeDOTcom .

Thanks,

Adobe AIR Team

[little fat girl]

Yes!  Actually, I have an even better sample project. It used to be pretty solid at 60fps.  Now it drops. It is also smaller. Then we talk.

Thanks!

[deesharm]

Hi,

Could you please share the sample project at deesharmATadobeDOTcom.

Thanks,

Adobe AIR Team

[little fat girl]

Thanks for your interest in this. I sent you an fla about a week ago.  Please let me know if you didn't get it.

I'm very excited that you are working on this. We have an update ready to go, but I don't want to push it due to the significant performance drop.  Thanks!

[deesharm]

Hi,

Due to some security issues i was not able to get the .fla file that you shared on my personal email.

Could you please share it again on dropbox or google drive and share me the link on my personal email (deesharmATadobeDOTcom).

Sorry for the inconvenience caused.

Thanks,

Adobe AIR Team

[little fat girl]

Apologies up front. I did some testing to see if I could be more helpful with this inquiry. I went back to Flash 6 and tested my project in Air 16, 17, 19 and 20. They all ran at about the same level of crappiness on my iPhone 4s. So the issue is not Air.

There *is* still a performance drop, but I'm guessing it is probably caused by the fact that my phone was running iOS 6 before (which ran like butter) and I recently upgraded it to iOS 8 (which runs poorly) so I could test the latest builds of my project in Air 20. That is sad. But unavoidable.

So, I am sorry to accuse Air of the performance drop. Sadly, I don't know what this means for my project since the performance issues still remain.

But thank you for your attention to this. I appreciate that you are working hard to make Air as good as it can be.