AIR is now from HARMAN, what to expect?

I work in an innovation lab for a company...  we are always trying new things. 

I started building all functional mobile prototypes in AIR because I can build in 2 days what takes a team to build in 2 weeks.

Today I have 40+ AIR built apps in each of iOS and Google Play.  There is no way I would have been able to build those apps at the speeds I did had it not been for AIR.

This is what is powerful.  I’ve gone from wireframe to App Store in 1 week. (Both platforms).

I tried porting my apps with react native, etc.  All of them had poor performance. They were ok but not great.  AIR is the next best thing to building in Swift or Android Studio in my experience.

All I hope for is that this tech remains for me to build with. I am happy to pay for it.

I wish there would be more features built in that get covered by 3rd party ANE companies.

On a side note...  if you don’t have anything positive to say. Please leave.  You aren’t helping anything. You‘re a part of the problem now. We need positive people to assist with pushing this forward.  If you truly want AIR to survive use your time to let everyone know how great it is.

Hi

Just to address a few of the points raised here:

- Samsung, and the wider HARMAN companies, weren't a factor in our decision here. We have been porting AIR and Flash Player for years, so in terms of a choice of who to take this on, we're better qualified than most as we already have a team with experience of the thousands of C/C++ files that goes to make up this runtime..! And we do know and love it.. I definitely appreciate the effort that Daniel, Jack, Josh and others have put into this technology and ecosystem and want to do something to try to leverage their experience, but it's early days still for this.

- it's not something we "bought" or something that we've done in order to support any existing internal products or apps using AIR. Afaik we don't have any of our own products using AIR, although it would be something I'm keen to try to make happen! But the way the company is organised means that entities such as Samsung opcos or our Connected Car division would be treated like a customer to us, just like any other customer.

- our 'legacy' work - i.e. the existing ports that we maintain and support for embedded platforms - are not and would not have been impacted by this. We already had the agreements in place with Adobe to support those customers regardless of what Adobe decided to do with the AIR SDK. But we see this as an extension of that work, so we now work to address a much wider base of customers and switch our support into a 'product' mode rather than being services-based.

I'm interested by the "less mature than modern cross-platform frameworks" comment though, as I see it as a lot more mature than some technologies that keep changing so dramatically and that come and go quite a lot. Anyway, we want to encourage your feedback as to how we can make this product more relevant for you all! From our perspective, we want to make this attractive for people to still use and for new people to pick up. So, please keep commenting, as even the so-called negative opinions are useful for us to understand where the ecosystem's concerns are so that we can try our best to address them!

thanks

  Andrew

Harman mentions that AIR 33 will be available on a "commercial basis", which probably means charging money for the update. After all, why else would they take over development?

AIR had a good ride, but it's outdated, less mature, and horrendously slow compared to modern cross-platform frameworks. I enjoyed working with AIR, but probably won't miss it.

ASWC is not only right, he is extremely competent. One of the few I follow on this forum, since his posts, although enfatic sometimes, are full of precious knowledge.

If we hadn't lived scattered around the planet it would be fantastic to share a few drinks amongst air devs. Leavers or remainders (fantastic metaphor).

It's a while that some of us (active or ex hardcore AIR developers) interact regularily on this forum. Somehow, even if we don't know each other personally, we get to feel each other personality by what we write. I have to say that I enjoy enormously our exchanges here, even the toxic ones. I am from a latin country, maybe that's why I am used to accept and understand occasional emotional bursts (including my own), without judgement or hard feelings, but trying to laugh about it, like I would do with a family member. Writing online can bring to impulsive communication, it might happen for any reason, also just because we are struggling with the same bug for 30 minutes or we are worried for a deadline or some personal issue... I like to think we are all on the same side anyway, and whatever happens it's just an inevitable part of the beauty of human nature. Long live to AIR and to you my friends.

What I HOPE and so far it seems a well placed hope, is that AIR will be maintained and have behind someone who actually cares and makes it profitable.

What I EXPECT, is a lot of pessimism and negativity from the usuals

It's the end, it's management of dead tech with the expectation of making some money out of it. The advantage for Adobe is that now the plug can be pulled on AIR at anytime since Adobe is not responsible for it anymore. For HARMAN, as long as AIR can make them some money they will run the updates but as soon as the income goes below a certain level then AIR will be out. This can come as soon as next month, you will never get a warning. AIR new feature from HRAMAN? You can always dream .... But dreams don't make apps.

Bad. Adobe was tired of keeping us locked up under the stairs, so their shipping us off to live at the orphanage. Maybe not worse, just a different flavor of miserable.

It also seems like there would have been so many better custodians of Air: Daniel from Gamua, Jack at Greensock, the guys from Distriqt, even older players like the guys at Multidmedia. I'm not saying those guys were interested. But I would have given to a crowdfunding campaign if one of them had been willing to take the helm. Finally, somebody who knew and loved the product would have been working on it. Air could have been exciting again.

But Adobe has been killing Flash since the day they got it. Now they can be done.

This can definitely be a good thing. I believe AIR still has a very good spot in the market for being the best alternative for doing light, effective and great apps/games for web, mobile and desktop. We have already moved on to Unity for most of our games (due to Adobe's lack of a clear roadmap) but we miss the speed of development getting a new AIR project up and running on all devices.

Now, we really need support for HTML5 output. Flash is out so this is a must for making any serious cross platform online apps/games.

And please, remove the air.* name requirement for Android. It's just stupid.

I think it's good thing.