Adobe Air Deployment

[Mordred58]

I have a series of training apps that i will be deploying on mobile devices.  I have created the materials in flash, and packaged them in AIR for the tablets.  for future apps, i'd like to also package them in AIR.  is there a way to deploy AIR enterprise wide, without having to package it in each app?    My learners are not savvy enough as a group to go to the play store to get the run time themselves...

[sinious]

Are you referring to needing to have AIR installed for the app? Yes you would need to package it in each as a captive runtime. It's really not that big.

[Mordred58]

yes.  i was hoping to install AIR, so each app will be a smaller download afterwards

[sinious]

When a user on an Android device tries to install your app and it does not have AIR a dialog pops up asking the user to install the latest AIR automatically. I just had it pop up when I was messing around on my SGS3. It's not that hard to install and any app your users run will pop the same dialog to install or update AIR for your needs. It's pretty foolproof and would  reduce your apps size by not including captive.

I'm assuming here you're referring strictly to Android devices. iOS must have captive runtime, there is no AIR support on iOS mobile and it must be compiled down to ARM.

[Mordred58]

yeah...with our learner base, even that would be a challenge...I think i'll just go with embedding AIR each time for now.

[sinious · Accepted solution]

It rules out the potential the user won't get the same exact experience you desire them to. Newer versions of AIR sometimes change the API, etc, so you won't need to worry about that. In contrast, any new performance or security enhancements won't be utilized as the runtime updates.

I put a captive in every one of my apps, be it desktop or mobile, just to be certain they get the exact same experience I designed.

[Mordred58]

that's a good point. thank you!

[sinious]

If performance or security enhancements come out that you desire, just update the app on the store and let the user update as they desire. Best of both worlds and let's face it, bandwidth is plentiful and cheap.

You're welcome and good luck!