the future of flash

Martin, I think you're misunderstanding us. Rolf raised a very good point, and it's secondary to your initial question. Yes, we know that AIR is not going to be discontinued at the same time as the web player. But Rolf pointed out that the last time Adobe addressed this was a significantly long time ago. And since that time, we have seen other reasons to be concerned about this. What we're saying is that even though Adobe has not given any new official messaging on this subject, we don't have a high level of confidence that such a message won't come at some point. Why would Adobe continue to pay developers to support AIR? What's in it for them? Animate CC sales? Animate has already largely been refashioned to target HTML5. And in any case, the vast majority of revenue driving Animate CC from Flash came from users targeting the Flash web player, not AIR.

Adobe has already shown how unwilling they are to invest money where they don't see the potential for return. They cancelled AS4 when they saw the industry shifting towards HTML5. They've now dropped the Flash web player sooner than they originally stated officially would happen. And most recently they canceled their funding for Starling and Feathers, the only two "high profile" frameworks for AIR. At the same time, since that forum message and corresponding news article that both date from July of 2017, we have not seen Adobe do anything to turn AIR into a product that can create revenue. There are no announcements about plans or ideas that could expand their appeal and grow their audience. We used to hear about that sort of thing as the company sought to make Flash monetarily viable. At this point, it appears extremely likely that AIR is a money loser for the company. And that in the past has been the recipe for those end of life announcements.

I'm not disagreeing with you that the last official message Adobe gave was that AIR would continue. I'm saying that because that message came nearly 2 years ago, and because Adobe has done nothing since then to make AIR viable, there's little reason to have high confidence in AIR's longevity. The company and its shareholders don't like to throw away money, and right now, that seems to be what they're doing with AIR.