Adobe AIR for Android now available

By Laura Khalil October 8, 2010

adobe air — Image used with permission by copyright holder

You may be familiar with Adobe AIR if you’ve use a third-party Twitter application on your computer. AIR is a popular application framework and environment that allows developers to write an app that can be used across operating systems.

While this is great news for developers and fans of these apps, it doesn’t mean you can instantly use AIR applications such as Tweetdeck on your Android. Applications will need to be specially designed for mobile use. App developers will need to use Adobe’s Flash Builder to develop AIR apps for Android. Mobile applications are required to be significantly less resource intensive then desktop or laptop computers.

In order to develop for AIR, developers need to be running Android 2.2, aka Froyo, or newer. From there they will have the option to port their existing code or build their application for the ground up using Flash and AIR developer tools.

Adobe states on their site, “Developers can write new code or reuse existing web content to build AIR applications for the Android OS. Because the source code and assets are reusable across the Flash Platform runtimes, Adobe AIR and Flash Player, it also gives developers a way to more easily target other mobile and desktop environments.”

Adobe AIR apps are already beginning to appear in the Android store, with the bulk being simple games, instructional or educational apps.

In case you’re in need of a refresher on the difference between Flash and AIR, here’s the lowdown:

Flash is optimized for applications running in your browser. The advantage of Adobe AIR is that it provides web applications that standalone (outside of the browser) and don’t need a network or Internet connection. Because AIR is standalone, it has a variety of advantages. It allows for improved security, the ability to store data locally, GPS support as well as offline and online use.

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