Adobe Air - An extremely powerful tool whose heyday has come and gone

Rating: 6 out of 10

June 17, 2016

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

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.

Pros

Adobe Air helped us very quickly build and iterate on games for both mobile and web.
Adobe Air gave our artists good integrated tools and a pipeline to make high quality 2D static and animated assets that were relatively easy to get into the game.
Adobe Air allowed us to deploy to both Android and iOS platforms with relative ease, without needing to have an Apple laptop to build from.

Cons

Adobe Air - at the time - was extremely difficult to get into in a non-professional sense. The industry standard tools for Air (Flash Builder and Flash Professional) were far too expensive to warrant purchasing as an independent developer wanting to try the technology. At the same time, Unity Free version provided a very easy way for curious developers to explore their tech with relatively few strings attached. As a result, it became increasingly more easy for us to find talented Unity engineers than Flash engineers, especially with the industry basically predicting the imminent death of Flash.
Adobe Air's iOS crash logs were almost completely useless for debugging. Because Air used its own iOS compiler (which admittedly DID give us the ability to build iOS games without a Mac), symbolicating crash logs for Air apps gave you nothing of use whatsoever. As a result, a lot of crash bugs on our end (mostly caused by native extensions) went unfixed for the lifetime of our products.
On the subject of native extensions - they were absolutely horrible to write and debug in Air mobile. There was VERY little documentation regarding how to build and maintain native extensions. As a result, being the engineer assigned to native extensions was about as exciting as being the janitor assigned to cleaning the toilets at Taco Bell.

Likelihood to Recommend

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.

Verified User

Engineer in Engineering (501-1000 employees)

Vetted Review

3 years of experience

Adobe AIR - Still a great solution (sometimes)

Rating: 7 out of 10

Incentivized

June 7, 2016

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

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).

Pros

Smooth transition from Flash/Actionscript 3, and ability to port older Flash projects to AIR with little to no code changes.
Ability to integrate custom and third party native extensions (ANE files) provides access to hardware and other APIs otherwise only exposed via native java/obj-c/swift.
Ability to code and test within a single IDE (Flash / Flash Builder / Flash Develop) makes it extremely easy to set up a project and development environment. The ability to use the Flash timeline is a huge advantage when doing animation.
The abundance of AS3/Flash examples and tutorials online provide a vast resource compared to other hybrid solutions.

Cons

Over the course of months/years, various security exploits and other issues are discovered and patched in AIR, often requiring you to rebuild and resubmit mobile apps to the various storefronts. This happens often enough that it's worth mentioning as a major con.
While development on Adobe AIR seems to be fairly constant, there is very little communication between the community and Adobe regarding the future and general support of AIR. The track record of Flash (and particularly Flash Mobile) does not inspire much confidence that Adobe intends to support Flash/AIR for years to come.
Adobe AIR does not seem to perform as well (in terms of raw performance, memory usage, framerates, responsiveness, etc.) as other hybrid solutions for certain tasks. For example using shaders tends to be experimental still, and graphic/animation intensive projects often require the use of third party frameworks such as Starling.

Likelihood to Recommend

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).

Thomas Gorence

Software Developer in Engineering at Intelity (11-50 employees)

Vetted Review

6 years of experience

View profile

Adobe Air - An extremely powerful tool whose heyday has come and gone

Rating: 6 out of 10

Incentivized

June 17, 2016

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Pros

Adobe Air helped us very quickly build and iterate on games for both mobile and web.
Adobe Air gave our artists good integrated tools and a pipeline to make high quality 2D static and animated assets that were relatively easy to get into the game.
Adobe Air allowed us to deploy to both Android and iOS platforms with relative ease, without needing to have an Apple laptop to build from.

Cons

Adobe Air - at the time - was extremely difficult to get into in a non-professional sense. The industry standard tools for Air (Flash Builder and Flash Professional) were far too expensive to warrant purchasing as an independent developer wanting to try the technology. At the same time, Unity Free version provided a very easy way for curious developers to explore their tech with relatively few strings attached. As a result, it became increasingly more easy for us to find talented Unity engineers than Flash engineers, especially with the industry basically predicting the imminent death of Flash.
Adobe Air's iOS crash logs were almost completely useless for debugging. Because Air used its own iOS compiler (which admittedly DID give us the ability to build iOS games without a Mac), symbolicating crash logs for Air apps gave you nothing of use whatsoever. As a result, a lot of crash bugs on our end (mostly caused by native extensions) went unfixed for the lifetime of our products.
On the subject of native extensions - they were absolutely horrible to write and debug in Air mobile. There was VERY little documentation regarding how to build and maintain native extensions. As a result, being the engineer assigned to native extensions was about as exciting as being the janitor assigned to cleaning the toilets at Taco Bell.

Likelihood to Recommend

Verified User

Engineer in Engineering (501-1000 employees)

Vetted Review

3 years of experience

Adobe AIR - Still a great solution (sometimes)

Rating: 7 out of 10

Incentivized

June 7, 2016

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Pros

Smooth transition from Flash/Actionscript 3, and ability to port older Flash projects to AIR with little to no code changes.
Ability to integrate custom and third party native extensions (ANE files) provides access to hardware and other APIs otherwise only exposed via native java/obj-c/swift.
Ability to code and test within a single IDE (Flash / Flash Builder / Flash Develop) makes it extremely easy to set up a project and development environment. The ability to use the Flash timeline is a huge advantage when doing animation.
The abundance of AS3/Flash examples and tutorials online provide a vast resource compared to other hybrid solutions.

Cons

Over the course of months/years, various security exploits and other issues are discovered and patched in AIR, often requiring you to rebuild and resubmit mobile apps to the various storefronts. This happens often enough that it's worth mentioning as a major con.
While development on Adobe AIR seems to be fairly constant, there is very little communication between the community and Adobe regarding the future and general support of AIR. The track record of Flash (and particularly Flash Mobile) does not inspire much confidence that Adobe intends to support Flash/AIR for years to come.
Adobe AIR does not seem to perform as well (in terms of raw performance, memory usage, framerates, responsiveness, etc.) as other hybrid solutions for certain tasks. For example using shaders tends to be experimental still, and graphic/animation intensive projects often require the use of third party frameworks such as Starling.

Likelihood to Recommend

Thomas Gorence

Software Developer in Engineering at Intelity (11-50 employees)

Vetted Review

6 years of experience

View profile

Adobe AIR Reviews & Insights