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Born2code
Known Participant
August 21, 2014
Answered

Will Adobe AIR be supported on the new Google Android TV?

  • August 21, 2014
  • 2 replies
  • 4370 views

Is Adobe planning on supporting the new Google Android TV that's coming later this year?

please say YES!!!!

Sean.

    This topic has been closed for replies.
    Correct answer chris.campbell

    This definitely looks like an interesting platform.  I'm not sure if we have one of the ADT-1 dev kits in house but I'm investigating.

    2 replies

    B
    Born2codeAuthor
    Known Participant
    September 5, 2014

    any news Chris?

    regards...

    chris.campbell
    Community Manager
    chris.campbellCommunity Manager
    Community Manager
    September 5, 2014

    Nothing to announce.  We've applied for an ADT-1 but haven't received anything.  I'm not sure if any testing has been done on the emulator.  Have you given this a try?

    The device looks very interesting, but I'm biased as an owner of multiple Roku's and an Amazon Fire TV (I've got an WD Live TV that was sadly boxed up.)  I'm definitely not the norm though, and I think it remains to be seen how successful these addon boxes will be. 

    Are there any statistics out there that show app sales/penetration on the current set of boxes?  I bought a controller with my Fire TV, but to be honest I wasn't overwhelmed with the initial set of games.  I liked some (life long You Don't Know Jack fan) but others (Sev Zero) left me underwhelmed.  I never got into any games on the Roku, other than a game or two of Angry Birds.  Is this atypical usage?

    B
    Born2codeAuthor
    Known Participant
    September 5, 2014

    No doubt in mind that Android TV will be big, for games and Video Apps (which is what Adobe is all about when it comes to AIR) so I think Adobe really should support Android TV. What's nice is that it will be built onto many new TV sets (not just boxes).

    Unfortunately it is not available for sale yet, so I can really test anything...

    I would imagine the technical effort on Adobe's part would be minimal (seems like same Android SDK with some new manifest xml entries).

    I can't find any projected sales, but keep in mind that you have some major partners here which have committed to Android TV eco system including LG, Sony and others, so it will get wide adoption no doubt, which means a great opportunity to push Adobe AIR platform so more people can adopt AIR as a true cross OS development environment.

    Is Adobe aware of this?

    Are they having meeting and talking about supporting Android TV?

      B
      Born2codeAuthor
      Known Participant
      August 26, 2014

      Can anyone from Adobe answer? Chris?

      chris.campbell
      Community Manager
      chris.campbellCommunity ManagerCorrect answer
      Community Manager
      August 26, 2014

      This definitely looks like an interesting platform.  I'm not sure if we have one of the ADT-1 dev kits in house but I'm investigating.

      T
      The Noble Robot
      Participating Frequently
      August 9, 2015

      Hi Sean,

      Nothing new to report but I have put this on the backlog.  I'm still curious though, I see AIR apps listed on my Google TV device, did they hand code the manifest?

      Chris


      I've been testing my app on my Nexus Player, and I've discovered two ways to deploy it while meeting all of Google's requirements. I've outlined them in a feature request here: Feature#3960940 - Support Android TV "banner.png" in AIR manifest

      At first, I unzipped my release APK to stick in the banner file, and decompiled my Android manifest to make the necessary changes to support Leanback and the locate the banner drawable, but oh man, doing that is a super big hassle requiring a few little 3rd-party utilities, that are not fun to use, in order to put everything back together.

      Then.. I found that you can use Android TV manifest features in your AIR manefest *if* you replace a specific *.jar file in your AIR SDK with a newer one from the Android SDK. That doesn't get you "banner.png" support, though, because you still can't arbitrarily put things in the Android "res" folder, nor define non-Adobe-approved icon tags in your AIR manifest for some reason, so you still can't compile your AIR app with banner support and still need to unpack and resign/align your APK.

      But, I got around that too by writing a ANE which simply puts my banner file into the app's res/drawables-xhdpi folder. My banner image gets compiled into the *.ane file, so it's not a solution I can easily distribute, although I'd like to be able to.

      I mean, I learned Java in order to figure this out! So maybe it was worth it... ;-)

      I appreciate that AIR will always lag behind native platforms, and that's fair, but it seems so odd that the OUYA icon got official support from Adobe in the AIR manifest so quickly, but official Android TV support is still MIA when it would be so easy to implement.

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