Air apps punished on Google Play - Adobe fix required

Hi Adobe team,

over the last months the developer community has been discovering an issue that causes freezes (ANRs) in Air apps. Since Google recently changed the visibility algorithms for Google Play to punish apps that show high quotas of faulty behavior, all Air apps are now directly affected by this punishment.

We believe that we have been able to narrow the problem down to playing sounds in an Air application. Developers report those ANRs both for streaming sounds as well as playing sounds locally. Specifically, our company has been able to reliably reproduce the freeze by creating a bot that will play our game over a lengthy session. After 1-3 hours, the app will just freeze. If we disable the sound, the freeze will not occur. Furthermore, if we endlessly loop a single sound instance with a volume of 0, the freeze also does not occur. However this workaround causes wake locks because the device can never go to full sleep even when the user puts it into background, since the sound still plays. Wake locks are also punished by Google Play, so it is just replacing one problem with another.

We have been reporting the issue to the Adobe Air forums, but we have not seen any feedback from Adobe, yet. I saw that there are more people from Adobe active in the Animate section, so I am trying my luck here as well. You can find more information in this thread and please make the team aware of the issue:

Air apps punished on Google Play - Adobe fix required

Dozens of developers have reported the issue already and we are very concerned since we have been unable to get any feedback from the Air team.

Thanks in advance