Adobe AIR Reviews & Insights

We developed a popular mobile and desktop RPG utility in Adobe AIR. The flexibility of Adobe AIR made it possible to leverage our old Flash skill set to seamlessly provide tools for both users at home and on the go. The entire development cycle for the app was built around Adobe AIR.

Adobe AIR was once the king of cross platform development. Sadly, I wouldn’t really recommend it to anyone at this point. It’s old, falling behind, not trusted by users, and a poor choice to build either mobile or desktop applications.

We were using it for HTML content on client websites and other web development tasks, which is a growing part of our business. However, it's no longer being supported by Adobe, which is very unfortunate. So we are moving to something else soon but will continue using AIR until it can no longer be updated etc. or it stops working.

With AIR, we construct apps using Adobe Animate components as ActionScript coders. We also used it to create a game for a client that ran on an intranet a couple of years ago. Since it's a self-contained app, it behaves like a normal program and so it's stable. The interface is Adobe standard so it's familiar and easy to use. AIR integrates with a browser as well, so it's hand for making add-on types of things. While it's a great program, I can't recommend it at this time as it's been discontinued. Which is a shame!

Develop and deploy rich Internet applications by combining JavaScript, HTML, Adobe Flash Professional, and ActionScript. End-users can access these applications from many types of devices including laptops, desktops, smartphones, and tablets. This cross-operating-system runtime system is currently used by the IT department and addresses two principal problems: cross-system functionality portability and ease of deployment.

If you need to quickly develop and deploy rich Internet applications that run on a broad range of devices, applications that offer basic functionality including graphics, transactional, lookup, dialog windows, etc., then Adobe AIR works well. It does use proprietary technology and in some cases, it is CPU and memory-intensive and can slow things down.

We have used Adobe AIR to help our team build out different applications on windows, mac and android. It has amazing capabilities and allows us to build excellent applications.

I would recommend [Adobe AIR] because it works very well, I just wish there were more resources out there on it to help the onboarding.

It's a great middleware solution for designing an app that is compatible with many devices that can pass relatively quickly through QA. We like to use it for developing applications for desktop use that aren't too heavy. Allows for fast, scaleable iterating.

Hackathons, making prototypes, testing an idea out with your team to see if it works before embarking on a more ambitious project. Currently we don't really use Adobe Air for any end user experiences.

We use Adobe AIr to create simple training modules for our sales people and sales associates that include text and animation. The modules are structured much like games, which is part of why we chose AIR to create them. It enables us to get training content to both new hires and existing staff in a way that is a bit more fun than the typical training material.

Adobe Air is no longer being used by Disney Interactive. In the past, it was used to quickly build and release high quality games for iOS and Android mobile platforms. Starting two years ago, Disney caught wind that Adobe Air was no longer going to be supported by Adobe in a capacity that we felt was worth our investment. At the same time, both Apple and Unity dropped support for Flash, and we made the executive decision to completely switch our tech stack over to Unity, as it offered much better support and arguably better performance for about the same level of time investment.

I still recommend new up and coming engineers to give Air and Flash a shot, because it's still pretty easy to learn and quick to develop for. I'm much less likely these days, as the heyday of Air has mostly come to an end, but I still feel like ActionScript and Air give newcomers a fairly intuitive way to build fast little games and apps to deploy on the web as well as mobile. I'm not up to date on the current pricing plans for the industry tools, but I can say that neither exorbitantly priced software nor expensive subscription models are any way to get new developers to adopt your tech. Take a hint from Unity and Unreal and let the tiny indies develop for free.

I previously taught Adobe AIR to students interested in making mobile game apps. I also occasionally use it when making my own video game apps on the side. However, I now teach Unity and tend to use that technology for side projects as well. It's just easier to use and tends to have better performance.

Adobe AIR is well-suited for a developer who is already familiar with Flash and AS3. It is well-suited for 2D app development using Starling or another third-party graphics library. However, to be used appropriately and avoid errors and poor performance, a basic understanding of programming principles is needed, so it's not great for a designer who hasn't studied a lot of coding.

I've used Adobe AIR to create hybrid/cross-platform apps and games that needed to run on Android, iOS, and desktop/kiosk devices. Using AIR allowed our team to stay within the Adobe suite (Illustrator, Flash, Photoshop), and also provided an easy way to build for multiple platforms with a single code base. This addresses the business problem of managing multiple versions of the same project, and helps keep assets standardized (due to integration with Adobe Creative Suite/Cloud).

A specific scenario where Adobe air would be a good candidate, is a project that requires the same experience to be delivered via mobile, desktop/kiosk, and browser (via flash). And one in which the assets are all created using Adobe software (photoshop, illustrator, etc.) A scenario where AIR is less appropriate would be a performance-intensive app/game, and especially any type of project that includes 3D assets. While there are 3D frameworks for Adobe AIR, there are many other solutions that would be much better suited for that task (like Unity or Unreal Engine for example).