Thoughts on Adobe AIR for Android?

Question

I may be assigned an Android project, and have minimal experience with Java but a lot of experience with Flash Builder. Does anyone have an opinion on Adobe AIR for Android, which lets you "publish ActionScript projects to run as native applications for the Android OS"? I'm generally wary of cross-compilers, but don't have a desire to learn Java either...

Answer 1

AIR isn't a cross-compiler really - your application gets published as an APK, which you can put on the Android market or whatever, but somewhere inside that APK is a SWF that gets executed by the Android version of the AIR runtime. When they say "native application", they mean that the user interacts with it the same way they interact with native apps, but the content itself is a cross-platform binary, just like desktop AIR (or Java for that matter). The process is entirely parallel to AIR on desktops, except that the deployed file is named .apk instead of .air.

In any case there's no need to speculate, as the runtime itself and the tools to create apps are currently in open beta. (Well, semi-open - the binaries are inside a prerelease program but everyone gets accepted automatically.) All I've done so far is to republish some content I had previously made for other platforms as AIR apps, but it's worked very smoothly so far.

The pros and cons are basically the same as the pros and cons of using AIR on any other platform, so if AIR in general would be a good choice for you, Android/AIR is probably worth your time to look into.

Answer 2

The big trouble with Air for Android is that only high-end devices are supported: Even phones with Froyo are not supported unless they have a cpu with an armv7 architecture... and many of the cheaper phones do not. Air for Android supported phones. This, IMHO, sucks.