Downside of developing for iphone with AIR?

[witherton]

   I've developed a few games with flash and have wanted to try my hand at some mobile apps. Most of my games are point and clicks and since I already know AS3, AIR  seems to be a pretty good option.

I've asked about Android- which I plan on targeting first- and it appears a major downside is that many AIR apps woud require additional software on older phones and that the required software is a bit of a space hog.

What are the downsides for developing for iphone? Does IOS require special software to play AIR apps? Do they run particularly slowly on the iphone?

[Guest · Accepted solution]

1)  The newest version of air is only compatitble with ipod 3/4 generation and iphone 3GS and iphone 4

2)  Like with android, you don't have access to every feature of the phone like native languages do (contact lists, push notifications, etc)

3)  Air for IOS is still a pretty new technology so there are / will be bugs and issues that you will encounter

4)  A lot more care needs to be taken for optimization than you normally would have to do on a desktop app

5)  The size of every IOS app is minimum around 4mb because the entire air runtime is packaged with each app.  This allows ios not have its users install the air runtime seperately like android does, but it also means for much bigger apps depending on your original size

All that being said, I am relatively happy with the speed that updates / changes are coming out.  IMO, with a few more tweaks and optimizations, air will really be able to compete with native languages  for certains projects.

Hope this helps

[Guest]

I want to develop a game and I am looking for the best cross platform development enviroment. It looks like Flash with Adobe Air would be stellar. A lot of users arent going to understand what AIR is and how to download and if they should. If I am reading correctly, iOS versions will bundle the AIR runtime with the game and install if AIR is not already installed? If so, that is a huge plus. Can I also add the runtime to an Android APK as well?

[Colin Holgate]

Whether Flash would be the best tool might depend a lot on whether you know Flash, what kind of game you're doing, and whether all of the features you need to do can be done. For example, if having Game Center and iAds is vital, then you wouldn't want to use Flash for the time being.

Flash based apps on iOS do include the AIR runtime engine, but it isn't an external engine that gets installed once into the system, each app would have a copy of the engine. That's good, in that you don't have to worry whether someone installing a later app might cause your app to stop working. It does mean that each app is a few megabytes bigger download than the Android equivalent.

On Android, the when a user downloads an AIR based app for the first time, they automatically get given the AIR runtime too. After that, any AIR apps that use the runtime that is already on the device only has to download the app itself, unless the app requires a later version of AIR, in which case the user is prompted to download the later version of AIR. It's not too painful a process.

People have requested that the AIR runtime be part of the APK, and I think that will be done one day, but not in the near future.

[sanika_Kulshreshtha]

Hi,

AIR on iOS does not require the any additional software to run. You can go through http://kb2.adobe.com/cps/891/cpsid_89107.html#main_New_features_for_mobile_applications for the list of features in AIR 2.6. It is hard to compare the performance of an arbitrary application from Android to iOS. The best way would be to give it a quick try.

Thanks,

Sanika

[jendabek]

And missing in-app purchase feature.

[Guest]

Hello and thank you. I actually I dont code at all. I am a project manager for software development by trade. I will be hiring a developer to build this game for me out of my own pocket. I think there are a lot more flash developers than iOS/Android native and thus the price would be cheaper since there is more available talent and only one code base. The game is a 2D board game so flash should be fine. While there is no game center, I have been looking into integrating playerio.com or Photon server from exitgames.com. As for ads, it looks like admob works via stage view based on some threads I read here. Lastly, in-app purchases may be possible via polayerio.com.