First, about Adobe keeping supporting AIR or not
Adobe have clearly said many times in forums, twitter, etc.
that the EOL of Flash in 2020 will not impact AIR nor the AIR SDK
see https://twitter.com/adobe/status/889878192994918401
People who keep asking Adobe to commit about a specific timespan
are clueless, it's like asking any other big software vendor
how long they will keep developing/supporting their products
nobody would answer such question
as a counter-example, if the web is that great then go ask Google
why they keep shutting down and discontinue many of their products:
google reader, google talk, google inbox, etc.
Second, about SWF in the browsers
that's a done deal, all major browser vendors have decided to stop supporting plugins
you can either port your SWF to web technology like HTML/CSS/JS
or you can port your SWF to desktop/mobile and for that I would advise Adobe AIR
some people view only the web as a legitimate target to publish an app or game,
that's utterly misguided, look at what happened on mobile platforms:
native apps have won and the web tech have miserably failed.
If you want to keep playing SWF files from within a browser after 2020 (and even earlier)
you will have to replace the browser, which ironically is possible with Adobe AIR.
Third, about the browser in Adobe AIR
Off course AIR does not work in browsers, AIR is meant to be an Out of Browser experience,
because browser technology is limiting when you want to build desktop quality apps.
Now, if you had online SWF apps or games working with the Flash player plugin inside the browser,
you can port those to either desktop or mobile apps or even both while keeping reusing the Flash technology.
Your SWF will run happily with Adobe AIR as a host instead of a browser engine as a host.
You can either reuse HTMLHost that reuse Webkit Safari (the browser embedded in AIR),
or use StageWebView (that reuse the system browser).
You can also use an ANE like WebViewANE.
It's not like you're without a solution, there are at least 6 different way to do it as I mentioned earlier.
Finally, about the longevity of Adobe AIR
It is liberating at least for a company to drop a technology when you don't know if it'll be still around 6 months from now. As a company we clearly estimated AIR death to be inevitable and to quickly follow 2020 flash death. I advise all companies or career pro to make the switch. |
You don't say why you reach that conclusion though, is it guts feeling? flip of a coin? reading the future in cards?
Why Adobe would have not taken that golden opportunity to also announce AIR EOL at the same time they announced Flash EOL ?
Why Adobe would bother to confirm that Flash EOL will not impact AIR and the AIR SDK if they had no plans to keep developing AIR ?
My educated guess is that they probably plan to keep developing AIR, it seems reasonable.There are many web technology that you also don't know if they will still be around 6 months from now, all those JS frameworks that pop up all the time and get forgotten few months later, would you still build a web app today with Backbone, Ember or Knockout ?
see The Brutal Lifecycle of JavaScript Frameworks
I would say, after Flash EOL, there is more chance that AIR keep being developed than the opposite.
Right now, there are many things that force AIR to stay compatible with Flash, without Flash backward compatibility then AIR development can evolve less encumbered.
Also, even if Flash got EOL'ed, even if many criticize ActionScript etc.
If you look at ActionScript 3 and Adobe AIR, those techs date back from 2006, more than a decade ago.
They are older than many new shiny things, also if you compare them to some of those new hot things like some JS frameworks, you can see that AIR is actually outlasting them.
eg. if I had built a desktop app based on AIR in 2010 (or earlier) I can still build it in 2018 (and with more features),
you could not say that about an app built with Backbone.js for example.
More importantly, Adobe AIR is not dependent on the browser vendors to keep on existing,
browser vendors can force browser plugins out but they can not impose anything on an independent runtime.
Tophermiller wrote Thanks. I don’t want to do future development, just want to preserve some work in AS3/Flash that took many years and millions of dollars to develop and is responsible for a lot of my company’s revenue. Repackaging it as a desktop app in AIR might be the only way to save it past Dec 2020. |
As long as you don't want to publish on the web, Adobe AIR is a good solution indeed.
With the current AIR SDK (31), even if Adobe decided to end AIR today, an Adobe AIR app could still be published with the AIR SDK for many years after on the desktop, the lifespan would probably be shorter on mobile as the operating systems there move faster and so require often updates to the runtime.
Example, few years ago Adobe decided to stop AIR support on the Linux platform in favour of supporting AIR on mobile platforms,
so the latest AIR version available for Linux is AIR 2.6, few do it but you can still publish AIR app for Linux today, it is limited to AIR 2.6 features and 32-bit apps but it does still work.
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The last 2 versions were disappointing and look like a "maintenance" update. My company has already started moving to other platforms.
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