AIR is now from HARMAN, what to expect?

[clouds40936465]

It is good or bad?

[hferreira80]

XAMARIN.

IF you want to develop Applications (or if you prefere "Apps") for iOS and Android then Xamarin is the way to go.

If you have previous experience with .NET/C# than it's even better.

[ASWC]

Yeah HARMAN was really a last minute thing, I don't want to blame them, they have no budget, only a small team and they try to make money to justify having taken on AIR. Was there even an alternative beside HARMAN? Maybe not, Adobe was going to drop AIR and they needed someone to hold the hot potato, was HARMAN the only choice? Possible. For sure Adobe was very happy to leave AIR behind and not have to worry about it ever again.

[rewb0rn]

Just in case it has not been posted here before, the Air SDK 33 release version is available. We have been able to compile our apps for 64 bits and are planning to release the first apps soon. Air 33 is also available as a free option if you are a hobbyist developer, in response to juvelez​

[juvelez]

You can't download anything until you accept their terms and conditions. The free option shows a splash screen injected at startup, it seems to be fair and our free apps could help support AIR development this way. But the other tiers are so expensive that is more viable to port some commercial apps to a near technology like Haxe and the new ones using a more profitable SDKs. Taking in count that I must update all my ANEs as well to support Android x64 and to support iOS min version that mus be 9.

What I mean is, it's a harsh and costly transition, in fact, there isn't a transition at all, we was caught in the middle of a technology change forced by Google and Apple, and they are taking advantage from that apparently just to win money, because Harman has not show any interest on another thing, they must give the AIR community a smooth transition, that would have been much more smarter, commercially speaking for them, because today there are more people leaving AIR that staying with it.

[hferreira80]

With more and more mobile demands (and AIR not supporting natively) and more and more issues, we need a lot of ANE's to fill the gap.

Resuming the all picture in a simple formula: AIR + 30 ANE's = stitched doll

Debug AIR on iOS device it's a nightmare.

If you don't agree, just try on Xamarin and you will see the difference.

Flutter brought the Hot Reload and other like Xamarin are already implementing this very important and productive feature (this week Xamarin released Hot Reload as preview).

Probably AIR (on this case IDE's) will never support it, because you pay only for the runtime and who implements IDE's commercially are no more interested in AIR !

[juvelez]

That's another thing to think about: IDEs, the best IDE for AIR development is FlashDevelop, but it seems to be abandoned by its community, more than 18 months since 5.3.3 version, despite you can use AIR 33 with it you can't target a platform beyond 28. Moonshine is stuck on AIR 28 as well, FDT and IntelliJ are quite expensive, and if you like to code on Adobe Animate or FlashBuilder you must PAY for Adobe CC, well for any angle you try to see the AIR ecosystem, is too ELITIST, is too expensive. Thats another ingredient you must add to the formula:

AIR + 30 ANE's + (Adobe CC || IDE) = stitched doll^2

[hferreira80]

My formula it's simpler because, I used AIR for Mobile as INDIE dev, so I'm profit from it's far to pay for it.

The fanny think it's that I moved to another tech and I'm willing to pay but I don't have to do it and have a much more exciting tech with news almost every week (as should be) and don't need all that ANE's because runtime implement it and it's updated.

BUT, if you need external routines, you have access to thousands of libraries without leave the IDE as free and open source without the pain of a closed source (black box) that you will depend for ever (if the runtime change from 32 bits to 64 bits, you are screwed).

[Flipline]

juvelez  wrote

But the other tiers are so expensive that is more viable to port some commercial apps to a near technology like Haxe and the new ones using a more profitable SDKs.

I guess it all depends on your specific needs, though personally I don't think the pricing is expensive especially if you have a portfolio of existing apps that you need to continue supporting.  We have a bunch of games developed in AIR already, and the costs involved in porting those to some other technology would be astronomical compared to the licensing fee Harman is asking for, especially since with Harman you're just paying for the tools and it's not on an app-by-app basis.

juvelez  wrote

What I mean is, it's a harsh and costly transition, in fact, there isn't a transition at all, we was caught in the middle of a technology change forced by Google and Apple, and they are taking advantage from that apparently just to win money

It was definitely terrible timing for us users that Adobe decided to do this right before the Google 64-bit deadline, especially when Adobe knew about this requirement for over a year and never bothered working towards it.  It sounds to me like Adobe was just planning on giving up and dropping AIR completely, until Harman came in to try to pick it up before that happened.  It makes sense that they'd have to start charging for it though, since Adobe was theoretically subsidizing development on AIR with their CC/Animate subscriptions, and Harman wouldn't have that to fall back on to pay their own development team.  At least Google pushed back the deadline for AIR apps and 64-bit though, so anyone who's not yet comfortable paying has a little breathing room.

[Giles Corey]

Actually the price of AIR announced by HARMAN seems good to me. Even the most expensive price seems good to me. I will be happy to pay every year as long as they can actually keep AIR in reasonable condition and fully integrated with Adobe Animate.

[Lars Laborious]

Yes, keeping AIR integrated with Adobe Animate is definitely the key for us as well.

[DanStarlight]

There are thousands, or even millions of games that were created with Flash. A lot of these games are disappearing from the internet even though they are still fun and would attract a lot of players.

Most of these games only need a minor upgrade to be turned into Android, iOS and Desktop AIR applications.

Those Flash programmers just need tutorials to upgrade their apps to AIR, to add advertising ANEs, and to streamline the process for uploading their games to the different stores.

Unity makes a lot of its money from its Asset Store. Harman could do the same by providing a centralized location for selling design elements, ANEs and code. There could even be a game store for all the great Flash games that were upgraded to work with AIR.

Harman can do something great with AIR, but this will require a clear roadmap to prove that AIR is going to improve and maintain its position as a serious SDK.

[juvelez]

Its hard to avoid thinking about Harman is pulling some strings(Its Samsung behind them), to acquire AIR just when Google announced that every AIR app must support x64 had a clear and opportunistic intention, with a shorten deadline than the rest of the frameworks, looked so obvious that even Google had to reverse or smooth a little bit its decision extending that deadline. Harman thought every AIR developer will buy instantly its new acquisition, but instead they received a massive desertion, with almost every AIR developer announcing the imminent porting of their games, and even their apps, with the new deadline the time was in favor to all of them to complete this porting... until today... that Google announced to all of AIR developers that have until November 1st, less than a month, to update ALL apps to target Android 9 (API Level 28), not even the Google apps support this last API Level. This shorten AGAIN the deadline for developers to port their games to a less than a month. But AGAIN Harman is doing the things the bad way, again they are repressing their supporters, this is a kind of technological masochism, nobody is going to run and buy its expensive and incomplete technology, instead, this is going to enforce even more AIR developers to move away from AIR for good and forever, I prefer to unpublish all my games than support this dirty game against all of the people that supported Adobe for decades. I don't know a single successful company built in less than a year, every one started first building confidence and gaining followers, Harman started beating hard the supporters of the technology they just acquired, well, how do they think this is going to end in a successful way for them?, this is going to end the obvious way: AIR DEATH.