HARMAN pricing. Is it realistic?

[ASWC]

HARMAN pricing has been announced and is not cheap. I said in a few posts it will likely be low and I was simply wrong. My company already said NO (I asked) and we are now leaving AIR for good.

I sure do understand the need for HARMAN to profit but it seems to me that pricing is too high. As a result maybe some people are going to pay while actively seeking alternative solution and quickly leaving the tech afterward.

What do you guys think of that pricing? Good for the future of AIR or not good?

[Frédéric C.]

mattr8755445  a écrit

What I really don't like is the rules about auditting, and needing to keep the subscription for as long as your apps are on the market.
As a Desktop game developer, I can publish a game on Steam, and possibly never need to update it. Under these new rules I'd have to keep paying the AIR fee every year, for who knows how long! But I don't publish games very often - once a year at most - so I can see how developers could exploit the old pricing and only buy a subscription for a month when they publish. I'm not sure what the best compromise is here - maybe give devs a good deal if they buy a long-term subscription, and charge more for a single month?

Either way, I'm keen to try porting my Desktop games to mobile, and if AIR makes that easy, I'll be happy, even if I have to pay a lot for it.
(But I'll keep using old versions of AIR for my Desktop stuff, if this pricing stays!)

As I said elsewhere in this thread, I'm with you about the two rules. Maybe a compromise would be to limit the license requirement to one year after the last app update? For example, you publish an app or a game with the paid tier, and then you'll have to pay that tier for at least one year of exploitation. After this year, you can leave the app as is, even if you cancel your AIR subscription. What I don't want to have to do, is to republish all my apps with a splash screen, if they don't sell anymore several years after their last update: it might represent a lot of useless work for me, and bring only annoyance to my customers.

[Leo Kanel]

I think pricing is ok. There is a free tier so people can still use it for free and then there are tiers for people who actually make money from it. If they do offer a good support and updates, it makes sense to pay. I wonder what people expected as pricing.

It definitely won't bring any new devs in (to be honest only a rebranding and starting clean would), but at least some legacy apps, get to live a bit longer.

[PippoApps]

I think it's marketing that will bring new devs. It might be also up to us. I will surely re-open my blog.

[hferreira80]

This only came to reinforce, that I was not wrong and did a good decision, when I jumped to another platform on mobile a few days ago !

I will not be a forced.

So, I'm using AIR exclusively for Desktop now, so, there will be no news on that area until 2020, so I will happy keep may AIR 30, thank you

I'm care now, only about Desktop and there is no big issue on that field, so basically Harman need to prove me that price.

Honestly, about the price, I see on 2 prospects (I already pay SaaS and this price exceeds any product that I pay, no doubt):

1. They will release non sense new features for AIR as Adobe did on the last years (I read here and there that no ones know what this new fancy features are) and Harman will not get my money !

2. They will release new ultra-super-exciting new features and I may pay for it

In resume and inspired on the spider-man, uncle : With great price, comes great features

[marchbold]

I think we need clarity over what the "revenue" numbers represent. Firstly I'm assuming they are USD? Are they solely revenue generated from the app? 

We develop AIR apps for clients which then take over the application, and profit from the revenue of the app. We may develop an app but never see any further profit from the app. This pricing seems to imply that we now need to cover the cost of the AIR license for our clients applications indefinitely?

How are AIR contractors considered here, eg we contract to clients who have an existing AIR app. Is our contracting income considered part of the "AIR-related personal income"?

[ZachBJ]

hferreira80

In resume and inspired on the spider-man, uncle : With great price, comes great features

LOLOLOLOLOLOLOL

extends "With great power comes great responsibility"

[hferreira80]

First, what is $25kpa ? $25.000 per year ?

Supposing, so.

I would expect something different for the 3 starting tiers:

Free Tier: If your App is free (OK, for the splash screen)

Personal ($9/month or $99/year - similar to the Apple subscription): Income less than $25kpa

Professional ($14.99/month or $149/year): Income less than $50kpa

For example, about the second tier and my expectations:

1. If I would pay for instance $50/year, I would expect the same as Adobe give us on the last 2 year. I mean, making AIR plugged to the survival machine). I would not expect great new features but only someone that cares about minimum OS/marketplaces requirements to exists (like 64 bits feature on Android).

2. If I would pay for instance $99/year, I would expect what I mention on point 1 + improvements / new small occasional functionality but nothing transcending.

3. If I would pay for instance $149/year, I would expect what I mentioned on point 2 + real cool new features (new HTML component for loading Google Maps on Mobile and desktop), SQLite updated, Toast wihout ANE's, etc ...

4. For the price they request: $199/year, I'm expecting much more, I mean everything from the point 3 + Linux full support + real cool new features.

For those who depend on Android and do not prepare themselves with the argument that they would use AIR while they existed (any AIR Mobile programmer depends on Android), they are completely in their hands and can complain but they will pay (ho, yes, they will pay).

They may even say it is temporary while they are migrating now, but I doubt the majority who did not migrate migrate now and will continue to pay.

So, this immediately means starting a good fit for them.

I for one hand I even understand, because there should not be so many AIR programmers out there and therefore have to raise the price to compensate.

For those who do not depend on Mobile, you might as well live with AIR 32 (even with AIR 30 because there's no news on the Desktop for a long time) and not have to pay a cent, however this should be a much lower developer base which will not affect their accounting as much.

[Oldes]

Yes... we will pay,

but I'm personally feeling betrayed by Adobe and I really consider if I want to keep my CC subscription.

As in our company new games are being developed in Unity, the only thing we need is to be able maintain existing projects running on AIR, which was OK until this 64bit Android requirement. I don't think that Adobe was not knowing it and 64 bit support cannot be so difficult for a company with resources like Adobe has. Native packaging for 64bit is just placing different files into different folder in a zip (ane) and tweaking with compilers settings to have a 64 bit runtime. A proof that it is not so difficult is, that someone without previous access to sources was able to implement it in relatively short time.

I have personal problems with other Adobe's products. When I open our 5 year old FLA file in current Animate, it is more laggy than it was before and I'm now having more powerful PC. There are still the same bugs I was reporting years ago when I was in the pre-release group. Working with current Photoshop is also quite not nice experience for me and I understand my colleagues who make graphics, that they are still using Photoshop CS5. When I wanted to use Typekit Roboto font (nothing fancy) for a web page with czech text, it had problems to display some chars correctly, so I switched to Google fonts and I should continue...

I really think that Adobe is in a really bad condition.

[PippoApps]

Ok it seems also this thread has been hijacked by AIR betrayed ex lovers.

Thank you rewb0rn​ for the valuable info. Looking forward to contribute financially to AIR.

A good day to all.

[hferreira80]

"Betrayed"

No way, I prepare my self.

Contribute, yes (depend on roadmap).

"ex lover"

No, I never, ever liked Adobe.

I like or liked AIR.

[Oldes]

hferreira80​ I wonder how you prepare yourself?

You can use different technology for new projects, but if you have several games, which each was about 5 to 6 years of work and are working just fine, you really don't want to port them into something new just because someone in Google (who has 30% of our sales) decide, that will not support 32 bit builds anymore.

I don't know how you, but I don't want to end my life continually updating old projects.

And I like AIR and I always liked it.. as I've liked old good Macromedia.

[hferreira80]

@Oldes On my use case, it's specific, possible and it's align to a need for a big layout refactoring.

I have oldest AIR Apps without updates for years that I don't support anymore and I will not update them or change technology, for sure.

If you have a game or App that is very old and don't get updates anyway, so, you don't need to change technology on that dated software. If you don't need to update, then, you also don't need to support Android-64 bits (will just work, just fine). At least for now.

They will not support 32 bits for NEW app or UPDATES of existing ones starting August 2019.

After August 2021, Google will stop serving non 64 bits Apps for 64-bit capable devices, so ONLY after August 2021 your oldest non updates games will indeed been affected and even so only on 64-bit capable devices.

If your game even without updates for so long have a huge revenue on that dramatic conditions, ... I don't need to tell more

[clouds40936465]

My suggestion:

For the first year or firsts months, the price will be lower.

[hferreira80]

That's also makes sense for me.

They said that they focus now on Android only, then iOS and next year, Desktop.

So, pay now "only" for solving mandatory Android issues is not fair comparing to AIR 32 (free) in the same way as me as a developer in an year start paying the same to get much more.

But, the price is set and none of us have been consulted.

It is what it is.

Even so, I believe that a few will complain but many will pay. Not all will pay but many will.

In a short term business it will be sucessfull.

In a long therm I'm not so sure but the things can always change.

[PippoApps]

I don't see how it'll be possible for them to actually find out the correct income for each developer. Too much grey area. I'll start with the free tier, that's for sure.

That's exactly the way. Unless you have the next Candy Crush clearly generating a lot of profit, it will be mostly based on trust and fair play. I think we can very well honestly attribute or guess the amount of profit we generate from AIR even in complex scenarios, and I really do not think HARMAN is going to question that. It will mostly rely on fairness and honesty. unless of course you publish the next Angry Birds made with AIR and you want to be in the free tier, then they might have something to say.

Also, providing development as a service for clients, (I mostly work on kiosks and enterprise closed app), it will be up to us to structure contracts more in detail dividing rates for UX, assets production, consulting, and AIR development, so that in case we might be able to show what is going on there.

I think elasticity is the key.

[clouds40936465]

Email from HARMAN about pricing:

Hi

Thanks to those who have recently registered to receive our updates. We are working still on a website, there are a number of internal formal steps we need to go through hence some delays I’m afraid, so for now we’ll keep communicating via emails (and thank you to those people who then share the information onto various forum posts!). As before, if you no longer want to be on the list of recipients, please reply by email and let us know.

As mentioned below, there were some issues with the AIR SDK beta that we released, and we have been working on this, particularly with the Animate team to ensure that we’ve got something that can be used with their existing releases. We’re trying to get a few more fairly key things into this so our original target of sending it out tomorrow may slip slightly. We’re still trying to have a very light touch in terms of quality control, just so that it’s in your hands as early as possible, so please bear with us while we focus on maturing the ARMv8 Android binaries in particular plus the SDK and build tools in general. The same will apply in terms of no distribution of this software until we’re satisfied with the quality levels so we will push the binaries out to those who are happy with the attached SDK license agreement. If you’ve not yet read and agreed to this, please reply with your confirmation and we can add you to the distribution list. (This is a slightly convoluted way of a website checkbox to say you’ve read and agree to the terms prior to download..)

We’re also been reviewing the feedback on the pricing plans that we published at the end of last week; thank you to those who have responded either via the forum posts or by email. We are looking to tweak the pricing structures a little in response to some of the feedback, but just to address a couple of points here:

1) we had planned to have pricing levels based on the revenue that you receive from the distribution of your AIR-based applications. This caused consternation both because of the potential issues for accounting, and for those whose business models are different from just creating and distributing their own applications. So we are likely to move to pricing based on overall revenue, with an associated adjustment of the various levels.

2) folk expressed concern at the idea of us having audit rights: this is perfectly standard, as those who have Unity subscriptions can testify to – but this doesn’t mean we will be auditing everybody! As a general rule this would only be invoked if we had major suspicions of a problem, for example if you were shipping the next Angry Birds or Slither.io but claiming to have tiny amounts of revenue, we might notice..

3) comparisons were drawn with Unity and the different levels there; I think because of the final ‘enterprise’ tier it caused a different comparison to what we had been looking at ($20/month for AIR vs $35/month for Unity for individuals; $99/month for AIR vs $125/month for Unity for professionals) but perhaps everyone is already earning above the extra revenue cap that we’d put in there for the professional level.. As mentioned above, we are looking at the pricing and tier levels again and perhaps will adjust how the subscription/tools usage is tied together to try to satisfy those who aren’t happy with this pricing.

4) we’re aware of the problems caused by the timescales, with the Android 64-bit Play Store requirements coming in so soon. We can only offer ours, and Adobe’s, apologies for this whole thing happening so late, it was a long process and we all wish that we were 6+ months earlier with everything. What we’re trying to do is to put AIR onto a commercially sustainable footing, which means ensuring that we can start to add features and improvements that are community-led. We will be putting together a roadmap shortly, when we get our website approved, which covers the short term and outlines some of our wish-list for the longer term.

There were some great suggestions sent in such as to have a ‘lite’ version of AIR with features stripped back, for a low price: things like this are definitely under consideration but would be a future step, as it’s quite a lot of effort to pull an individual feature out from the AIR codebase!

many thanks

     Andrew et al

[Frédéric C.]

I think Harman are going in the right direction. For me, the price is not the issue, but audits and verifications could have become very cumbersome. Tiers based on global revenue might be easier to handle than trying to figure out what comes from AIR-related activity, and what doesn’t.

[Leo Kanel]

You should have more faith. See this guy for example:

In March 2, he told us not to freak out, and 64bit is coming soon. AIR 33 on March, AIR 34 on June, so probably AIR 35 by September.

Joking aside, if a company is able to drop AIR right now and use an alternative solution, there is no point on staying in AIR. AIR for mobile is as old as it gets, and although it is ok to use for desktop, it won't be forever.

[zwetan_uk]

https://forums.adobe.com/people/Leo+Kanel  wrote

You should have more faith. See this guy for example:

In March 2, he told us not to freak out, and 64bit is coming soon. AIR 33 on March, AIR 34 on June, so probably AIR 35 by September.

Joking aside, if a company is able to drop AIR right now and use an alternative solution, there is no point on staying in AIR. AIR for mobile is as old as it gets, and although it is ok to use for desktop, it won't be forever.

here the joke, there are some so called "professional" that still don't know what is an EOL

EOL as "End of Life" means a product is not updated anymore
see End-of-life (product) - Wikipedia

because in June HARMAN released an AIR SDK 33 beta

and before that announced they were taking over AIR (runtime and SDK) development

AIR as a product is simply not EOL

there is an AIR SDK 33, it does support Android 64-bit, that's a fact

you can repeat as much as you want like a mad man that you are dropping AIR, that's your choice

same for ASWC, but please just stop to try to convince everyone around that you are "right"

and that everyone should do like you

you are criticizing Adobe, HARMAN, etc.

and you really don't know what you are talking about

sorry not sorry, but I will not take advice from subpar developers who don't even know how to maintain their own projects
and find it fun to spend countless hours on forums destroying the reputation of a good tech

so yeah I gonna repeat it, there is nothing to worry and no need to freak out

come back in few months or even few years and AIR will still be around
whether you like it or not

if you really want to help people as a professional software developer (assuming you could fit in that category)
instead of spreading rumours and fears about a particular tech like AIR

you should instead tell us how easy and painless, how long it takes and how much it cost to move/port a project from AIR to something else: C++, Qt, Xamarin, React native, Flutter, Cobalt etc.

see something like Cobalt is quite interesting
https://cobalt.dev/

it's from Google/Youtube, it got a great cross-platform OS abstraction, and many things

in fact you can even port it to any platform you want (provided you do the work of actually porting it)

https://cobalt.dev/starboard/porting.html

you could certainly port an AIR app to Cobalt, but it would definitively not happen overnight

[ASWC]

Found this this morning and couldn't resist:

zwetan_uk Jun 25, 2019: "here the joke, there are some so called "professional" that still don't know what is an EOL"

zwetan May 30, 2019: "yeah I agree that’s why I also see it as an EOL from Adobe"

https://discuss.as3lang.org/t/the-future-of-adobe-air/1780/2

It's got to be a different guy right?

[Leo Kanel]

zwetan_uk Not even gonna read that as you just don't worth my time. You seem like a sad indie /hobbyist dev who don't get jokes and try to hard to prove air is still a thing. Maybe it is time to hit the books again and realize what technology is available in 2019.

[ASWC]

People do misrepresent just to make a point, this is what zwetan is doing here. You and I correctly call AIR 32 EOL, not AIR, not AIR 31, not AIR 33, and he comes back with "AIR as a product is simply not EOL" as if that was our argument. Of course it wasn't our argument and zwetan is discrediting himself once again, sad.

[zwetan_uk]

https://forums.adobe.com/people/Leo+Kanel  wrote

zwetan_uk  Not even gonna read that as you just don't worth my time. You seem like a sad indie /hobbyist dev who don't get jokes and try to hard to prove air is still a thing. Maybe it is time to hit the books again and realize what technology is available in 2019.

you brought it up by posting a screenshot about something I wrote at a different time under a different context

call that a joke but basically use that to discredit me publicly

for the indie / hobbyist part LOL, I'm a professional software developer since December 1995

I do use AIR since it was in beta as the Gemini project and then later Apollo

and because I have more than 20 years of programming and building projects under my belt
I can tell you very seriously that AIR is a pretty damn good tech

I did work with C++ and Qt, I did work with wxWidgets, and all the other tech mentioned above and more,
when I mention Cobalt it is because I built a proof of concept with it recently, and at the same time I probably

mentioned something you were not even aware existed (you know as an alternative to AIR)

so you come here telling everyone

"if a company is able to drop AIR right now and use an alternative solution, there is no point on staying in AIR"
but when asked the hard questions: what alternative tech did yo use? how long did it take? how much did it cost?

oh there you can not bother to read and seem to be incapable to answer
so shocking ... lol

and now to put the final nail in the coffin using one of your favorite expression
no there is no AIR EOL, you do not qualify a product life by its versioning or by the company owning it

look at Flash
1993-1996 FutureWave Software, 1997-2005 Macromedia, 2006-2020 Adobe Systems
did you heard of a Flash EOL in 2005? nope

the product, AIR, is there, not dead, not EOL'ed, someone (HARMAN) is maintaining it and will keep developing/releasing it

I'm so sorry you can not understand those simple facts

[Leo Kanel]

I will respond to what truly matters which is technology

If a company, like ASWCs, have the man power and already did the work to leave AIR, there is no point of staying in AIR. When it comes to mobile, AIR is an old problematic framework, which was designed to be modern 10 years ago. All developers who value their customers, would never deliver unsecure and dangerous software to their clients. So to technologies of 2019:

• Mobile Options for Gaming:
  • Unity 3d - Learning Curve: Easy - Transferred a casual game from AIR within a month. It also allows VR natively and 64bit since last year + Consoles
  • Game Maker - Learning Curve: Super Super Easy - This is the best alternative for Flash guys. You can make a game within a few days. + Consoles
• Mobile Options for Apps:
  • React Native - Most popular one, easy to start and use, huge community. Learning Curve: Easy to Medium. First app migrated to this during evaluation was a Conference app. Took us about 4 days to move from AIR to React Native.
  • Xamarin.Forms (Not Xamarin Native) - Popular if you know c# or .net. Medium community but mature tech. Learning Curve: Medium. - We used this during evaluation and migrated a business app (POS for eshop) within 1 month
  • Flutter (supports Mobile, Desktop, Web) - Popular with everyone nowdays. Huge community, huge set of packages. Learning Curve: Hard - We selected this one to move all our AIR apps, including the ones used by millions around the world as it is the only one that gives Native performance. On of my fellow AIR devs managed to migrate one of our apps (Radio App) a few days ago, within 5 days. From 0 knowledge of dart /flutter to replicating the app within a week.
    
    
• Web (AIR doesn't even have to be compared here. No AIR - Web Target)
  • Angular: Not very light weight but Learning Curve: Easy
  • Vue.js: Light Weight and Learning Curve: Easy
  • React - This one is the tech to go for many AIR Devs. The Feathers UI Author, even wrote a tutorial on how to migrate from Flex to React. Learning Curve: Easy
    
    
• Desktop
  • Electron with any of the above.
    
    

The best thing about all the above technologies is that you can find developers for your company within a week. Try it. Put out a hiring listing for AIR vs any of these and find out how many CVs you will get for AIR.. Check number of questions in Stack Overflow or github recent commits in AS3 libraries. Hard numbers tell the sad truth.

If you wan't to do something of value (by value I mean, sell, get users, be profitable, be able to attract funding and grow the product), then this is the way to go.

Flash, AIR, Flex where fun for their era, but this is long gone. Maybe Harman will breath some more life into it, and I hope so they do, so we don't have to kill apps which doesn't make a lot of revenue now, but I don't expect AIR to become Unity.

[rewb0rn]

Thanks for suggesting this for the 10th time, but we are very happy with Air, so we are staying. Also thanks for the continous reminder that you moved on and only hang around here because of reasons.