Advice: Is my Adobe Flash knowledge useless in 2020?

[Arjan CS]

Looking for some advice please.

At the turn of the century I was in high school and studied multimedia design. I learned html and css. I designed in tables, so that says a lot about the times then. Anyway, I started learning how to use Macromedia Flash and then Flash MX.

I invested a lot of time into learning how to animate stuff, use action script to build presentation, games, landing pages, and other interactive stuff. I then got a job building websites and then the iphone came along and that was the end of me creating anything in Flash. There was no use for flash because apple said so... (obviously there is more to this)

But up until then, I was very excited of the idea to create mobile apps using flash.

Since that time life moved on and I grew in my career by creating websites, but I use html, css, javascript, php and various code libraries.

Now in 2020 and rediscovering Adobe Animate, I wanted to ask the community here and get some advice.

I haven't used Animate, but looking at videos online. I am very confident in my ability to create in it.

So I would like to use animate to create interactive content like apps and even make some cartoons.

The main question is, is this even an option? Can you make apps for android and ios without a ton of compilers?

I really loved creating in Flash and my career took me somewhere else. I will be doing some research on my own, but I wanted to gather some opinions from people who are actually creating apps and interactive content. 

Because I work with a lot of developers, they all look down from their keyboards at flash and animate. Are they right to do so? I can program too, but I love being creative, which for some reason some of them can't.

So, is my adobe flash knowledge useless in 2020? Should I move on? Or is there hope?

Links to so examples would be very appreciated! 

Thank you!

[Vladin M. Mitov]

Your thorny path to Android 🙂

Animate > SWF > After Effects > (Bodymovin or Lottie) > Android

[Arjan CS]

Thank you! I will look into this. I guess there is no easy way.

[rayek.elfin]

Years and years ago I used to be a Flash developer of "multimedia rich experiences".

Don't bother with SWF/Action script at this point. It is a dead technology, and while there are still options to export to mobile, I would just focus on Animate's html5 export. That can be converted to working mobile apps as well, and the workflow allows you to keep working with the Flash/Animate knowledge you have.

If, however, you require optimized native mobile performance, you might have to look at other alternatives. For interactive cartoons it should be fine, though.

[Arjan CS]

Thank you! This response helps. 

[Joseph Labrecque]

As others have stated, Animate can definitely be used for a lot of what you mention... but the whole "dev" aspect to it has been waning for some while now. There are other platforms that use ActionScript like Apache Royale and RedTamarin if you enjoy the language... and you can still use AIR SDK to generate apps for iOS and Android if you like. 

Animate will also be getting a LottieFiles extension soon: https://lottiefiles.com/plugins/animate