Is it true? Adobe AIR based Android development ha

Question

Is it true? Adobe AIR based Android development has no future. And I heard, Android no longer supports ADOBE AIR/FLASH Systems. Is it True? And HTML5 Is the best alternate, I heard. Are these points true?

Answer 1

1. Not just "Android no longer supports Adobe Flash browser plug-in". Adobe discontinued development of Flash plug-in for browsers on mobile. The point here is that modern web experiences should prioritize mobile and thus I would personally recommend to limit Flash content usage in a web application when it is possible.
2. Adobe AIR applications compile to native applications for both Android and iOS. So you can use it to develop mobile native applications as long as Adobe supports it. If your application is resource intensive or need some access to specific native APIs, there could be certain limitations and thus Java and Objective C might be preferred option depending on platform.
3. HTML5 is completely different story. You cannot build native mobile applications in HTML5 as such. You can build web applications with it. Nevertheless, some tools like PhoneGap can be used to package it as a native application. But there are also certain limitations as with Adobe AIR.

P.S. Unfortunately, there is so much misperception and ignorance with all of that and there are so many people out there who have no clue about the technological aspects, but make categorical statements.

Answer 2

If Abode AIR has a future or not is of course difficult to say (it's still in its early days compared with the Flash Player), but let's be clear here:

Adobe has "only" discontinued the development of the Flash Player for mobile devices. So basically, no flash in browsers on mobile.

It is my understanding Adobe did this so they can focus on the Flash Player for desktop and focus on Adobe AIR. Let's be honest, the flash player was never going to be supported by iOS, and on Android it was pretty crappy. So I imagine it wasn't a very hard decision to drop the plugin for mobile at this point.

I believe AIR is something Adobe will very much focus on, and according to their roadmap they will try to update the Flash Player and AIR runtime simultaneously in the future, and shift focus for the Flash Player to gaming and premium video.

As been pointed out, AIR can be used to create native apps for iOS and Android, and it's very convenient to develop an app once and then be able to target both platforms, as well as desktop. However, The first time I tried to compile for iOS and Android the performance was horrible (pretty much unusable for gaming). It's gotten a lot better since, but it's still slow compared to an app developed natively with Objective-C for instance. The fact that Adobe will focus on gaming will hopefully result in significantly improved performance for mobile in the future.