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.
Pros
Easy to develop for, skills for programs such as Adobe Animate and basic backend translate well to the program.
Stable across multiple different platforms.
Can get a working prototype really quickly
Cons
Adobe Air applications are taxing on a user's CPU, especially considering how simple a lot of the apps are.
Updating and installing Air based applications is very user unfriendly, often asks for updates that are aggressively pushed to the front of the user.
As HTML 5 has gotten more and more sophisticated, for basic things a lot of times browser-based apps make a lot more sense.
Likelihood to Recommend
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.
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.
