Ideas and suggestions for new roadmap

[Frédéric C.]

Hi,

Now that Harman will manage new versions of AIR, and are asking for community feedback, I thought it would be nice to gather here all ideas, suggestions, bug reports or any brainstorming that could help Andrew and his team plan their next steps.

PLEASE, DON'T use this thread for opinions, ego wars or pure speculations about Adobe or pessimistic views about AIR. There are already two big threads dedicated to this, we don't need a third one. For once, let's try to be factual and constructive. Thank you.

I think we could split the points in three categories:

- Short term actions

- What new features would be appreciated

- Long term plans

1) Short term actions:

- Implement Android 64bits support

- Create a website dedicated to AIR, presenting its features and gathering as much resources as possible. Possibly create also dedicated forums, as Adobe forums may be a cursed place, now.

- Anticipate iOS SDK upgrade for requirements that may come with iOS 13

2) Cool new features:

- Adaptive icon support on Android

- Assets.car generator for iOS developers using Windows platform

- Add more texture RAM for mobile

- Improve Android audio support

- Make some AS3 methods compatible with object pooling like for example Matrix.transformPoint

3) Long term plans

- Market AIR and spread the word about this tech. Provide tutorials, examples, videos...

- Keep Android and iOS SDK up to date

- Maintain compatibility with current toolchains, including Adobe Animate

- Linux target ?

- Web target ?

Those are the points I had in mind, but I'm sure you all have specific needs and ideas. So please, share!

[chaky]

I would like the most if Harman could solve all the performance issue with AIR and all weird memory allocations with iOS (when comparing numbers with === or assigning Vector with non primitive type to a variable or returning it from function), and many internal APIs where pooling is not implemented.

And problem where Context3D.clear takes up too much time on mobile devices. That would be gold for me. And of course to increase GPU memory limit, but they already have that one in their roadmap.

Also there is a problem with huge memory leak with DirextX11 on Windows.

My biggest problem with Adobe AIR currently is performance  issues and limited GPU texture memory. Once that is fixed I am golden.

[juvelez]

Well it is really worrying the way you take the security related issues, every Release Notes of every AIR new version has a section called SECURITY IMPROVEMENTS, obviously you are missing that chapter, and you are missing Security Bulletins as well, and since AIR 2.6 that were apsb11-05, apsb11-07, and apsb11-12, are several dozens of those Bulletins released, ALL OF THEM regarding to the security risks, of all kind. Downgrade always means security risks.

If you think that AIR development since version 1.5 and AS2/AS3 since Macromedia is to know nothing, well is your opinion, based in what?, I don't know.

To Stop this empty discussion...

What I'll advise to all AIR developers right now is, if you are desktop business apps developers, stay with AIR, it will be pretty expensive to port your apps to something like VS(That's free by the way, and pretty robust, and you can develop for all platforms), please stay with AIR for budget reasons, I really recommend you to use VS community for new apps. You will have GUI contextual editors, visual development, a centralized extensions(Nuget) marketplace full of all kind of supported and curated extensions, a lot of platforms and architectures.

But if you are a Game Developer, Mobile and/or Desktop, I can't recommend you stay with AIR, because the AIR limitations force to invest in a lot of additional technologies, extensions or development time to achieve some really native performance and access among the high prices of AIR, it will be less expensive in the long term to port your games to Haxe using Starling or Flixel or OpenFL, the performance is really native because the cpp compilation, you'll have exactly the same APIs for all platforms, even Web. For new Games I'll recommend to use Unity or Haxe as well, some of the best AS3 frameworks like Starling, Feathers or Away 3D are already ported to Haxe, with a really good performance.

I am done with AIR, I am moving my entire working pipeline away forever, since this Harman thing I'm going to use 3 mayors developments pipelines: VS, Haxe and Unity. So if I decide to stay until Harman release something useful, I'll broke.

[ASWC]

You are 100% on point here. The overall technological comparison (overall is the important word here) between AIR and Unity is dreadful simply because AIR loses at every point. There's not one thing AIR does that Unity doesn't do better or way better, simple as that. On top of that of course Unity has more publishing targets.

While a few years ago AIR could compare to Unity on some points or even come on top (2d), it's no longer the case. AIR is way behind, so HARMAN pricing is unrealistic in the sense that it will certainly not bring new developers to AIR. A new comer will compare prices, what the tech can do, and then decide not to go with AIR, simple as that.

You are also correct, HARMAN should not compare AIR to Unity and should stop mentioning Unity in their communication. AIR is way too far behind, it simply doesn't compare. On top of that of course HARMAN long term roadmap simply confirms that AIR in 2/3 years will still be far behind what Unity is Today.

Now again, as I said at the beginning this is the overall picture, many don't have a use for all Unity features or all AIR features and so on case by case basis AIR and Unity can compare and even AIR can be more attractive when you have a limited number of publishing targets and needs.

HARMAN is prolonging AIR life but is not going to make it a more relevant technology anytime soon as their long term roadmap clearly shows. Once the roadmap is complete, AIR will still be a technology that won't be mentioned in cross platform articles and forums and for good reason.

[chaky]

AIR is way behind, so HARMAN pricing is unrealistic

I don't understand how is 16 dollars per month unrealistic for AIR when Unity charges 125 dollars per month?

[ASWC]

125$ is actually for 3 seats so it's around 40$ per person. The list of what you get in term of out of the box features in comparison to AIR is huge. But my post was about comparing AIR to Unity so for 16$/month as compared to ~40$, if you wanted quite a lot of features/platforms from your framework then Unity would win even at that price and AIR would feel so poor and overpriced. If you don't need all those features then obviously you shouldn't have to pay that much for it and AIR would become more interesting.

[ASWC]

Actually let me correct what I said, my monthly fee for AIR would be around $100 per seat, while for Unity it would be around 125$ (42$ per seat), we have 3 developers still touching AIR so that's 300$/month for AIR versus 125$/month for Unity. In our case Unity would offer way more for 1/3 of the price. Note that the price difference is irrelevant for my company of course but when looking at what you get for the price + long term support then Unity is the obvious choice. I understand not everyone falls into the +500k category but in that range Unity is cheaper.

[Flipline]

It's still actually only one seat of Unity for $125 -- you do get 3 seats of "Unity Teams Advanced" included which is a completely different product.  Aside from that though, I agree with you that AIR shouldn't be compared with Unity since they're not really in the same category, and yeah that's a tough sell for attracting new developers if they're looking at the two side by side.  In our case the AIR pricing is fine for allowing us to update/maintain our existing apps, and to continue with some new apps that use the same pipeline, but getting support from new developers vs. the built-in customer base of legacy developers will be the real challenge here.

[ASWC]

I see, I misread the Unity pricing completely then. So yeah AIR is definitely cheaper but like you said AIR shouldn't be compared to Unity anyway.

[Frédéric C.]

@ASWC I think you're quite severe with AIR. Personally, my current experience in Unity is not as glorious as I expected it to be. Yes, in theory there are many features available. But to me, Unity feels now like a monster which has grown out of proportions. By growing so fast, it was almost impossible to keep consistency between versions. So when you begin to work on a project with Unity, it is recommended to stick with it till the end (and possibly say good bye to the new cool features that will be implemented 6 months later, at least without having to readapt all your project to the new version).

Also, everything feels sluggish to me, even on a decent rig. There is no mystery: the more you offer, the more your engine gets complicated. For me, learning Unity is not hard because it is complicated. It is hard, because there is contradictory information everywhere (since many things change all the time) and new approaches are supposed to replace old ones (I think, for example, of the recent new Lightweight Render Pipeline for 2D games, or the fact Unity uses more and more packages for implementing features).

And I don't even speak about assets on the Unity store, where it is a nightmare for authors to keep their assets compatible with all versions (some of those I use for example decided to be only compatible with Unity 2019, leaving all previous versions unsupported).

Sometimes, bigger is not better.

In that regard, I think AIR has an excellent features/weight ratio, where there are many things possible with a tool that still remains very lightweight (at least compared to Unity). Moreover, Unity could be considered as a special case, as there are not many techs that saw such a huge growth and investment in the recent years. It means that in an article listing different cross-platform solutions, AIR could be perfectly listed here, IMHO.

[ASWC]

There's a lot of things I don't like about Unity so I'm with you on that. My post was mostly about comparing AIR to Unity in term of out of the box features and pricing and joining the point that AIR shouldn't be compared to Unity, it's not the same category/type of framework and HARMAN should give up on mentioning Unity in their communication, AIR can't be compared to it, and even after the long term roadmap is complete AIR would still not be comparable to it. There was a time though when AIR was playing in that same category (supporting all platforms, having tons of features) but that time has passed, now AIR is something else and personally I still think it's overpriced for what it offers in the sense that I don't see it attracting new developers.

[PippoApps]

It's a good topic, but your list is very unrealistic.

It doesn't depend on Harman, not even MicroSoft or Apple could do what you ask in a realistic time frame.

[PippoApps]

Still comparing Unity to AIR...

It doesn't make sense.

They are used in different scenarios.

[ASWC]

I haven't really look deep into the pricing and even got some wrong but if the pricing comparison presented by juvelez is correct or fairly close then AIR might even by more expensive in some scenarios. If that's the case then it makes matters even worse for AIR.

If there are scenarios where AIR is more expensive than Unity, then we should expect the most expensive option to also be the one that provides the most. Clearly it's not the case with AIR vs Unity. Again, if the comparison juvelez presented is correct then in the scenarios where AIR is more expensive who in their right mind would still pick AIR?

[juvelez]

That's the point!!!, it doesn't make sense at all compare AIR with Unity, but Harman's guys started, I didn't , I in fact their current prices table is product of that comparison. And what make even less sense is that AIR will be more expensive than Unity.

[Flipline]

Yeah I agree it doesn't make sense to compare them, though to be fair AIR is only more expensive than Unity in certain scenarios.  If you're making < 50K they're the same price, and if you're making > 200K AIR is cheaper than Unity. It's in the 50-200K range that AIR can be more expensive, though I'm sure with Unity development you're going to need more seats overall for everyone on the team, whereas with AIR you'll need seats for anyone compiling but your artists and animators likely won't need seats.

Overall it's up to each company/individual to decide the right tool for each project, and if you choose AIR for a project then the seats are just the cost of doing business, the same as if I'm going to be spending $600/year for Adobe CC for an artist, $500/year for IntelliJ IDEA for a programmer, $1500/year for a Unity seat, etc.  I get why people (including Harman) would compare AIR to Unity because of some use overlap, but they're different tools and personally I'm not going to worry about whether Product X has more features than Product Y just because it may cost more.

[Stephdidou]

Adobe AIR for smatwatches (Samsung / Apple)

Widget for Android ?

[Sarah Northway]

All I care about is supporting new hardware and operating systems as soon as legally possible.

Like, not crashing on the Android Q beta. And displaying properly on Samsung's Galaxy S10+ ON DAY ONE. I want HARMAN to work privately with Google, Apple and Samsung to preemptively fix compatibility issues on the OS side, before they even happen. If that isn't possible, I want an AIR update available to fix it as soon as I hear about any compatibility issue. If Apple or Google changes the way they handle icons or permissions, I don't want to be hacking open my APK to fix it with obscure advice from the forums, and I don't want to wait 3 months for the next update cycle. I want an official solution available immediately from HARMAN.

[Sarah Northway]

Support for consoles, html5 and linux (again) would be cool BUT -

I switched to Unity years ago when it became clear Adobe had lost interest in AIR and was more likely to drop platforms than add new ones. They knew about Android's 64 bit requirement for two years and never so much as commented on it. Harman has a LOT of work to do to convince me that AIR isn't still in end-of-life mode right now. And to be honest, so far it looks like the new AIR team is 3 or 4 people max and they're already in over their heads. Unity has 2000 employees. I'll pay for AIR 33 because I want my older games to keep working on new phones, but I'd be mad to bet my company's future on AIR right now.