I have already talked (perhaps too much) about the Future of Flash in this post. There I didn’t hide my perplexities about the Market position of Flash compared to alternative technologies. After the drop of Flash Player for Mobile there was a strong decline in confidence for Flash platform. But now the scenario is beginning to emerge sharply and I begin to understand the purpose of the Adobe strategy.
Yesterday Adobe has released a public beta of AIR 3.2 for mobile application development. This version implement the promised support for Stage3D in mobile platforms like iOS and Android. A number of demo video appeared on the web showing excellent 3D performance and a lot of renewed interest about mobile game development using AIR:
Square Enix’s [Barts] running on Android
The time will tell, but AIR has the potentialities to become a leader platform in 2D/3D games development. A single code base is sufficient to create a game for Desktop (AIR’s captivate runtime), Browser (someone named Facebook ?) and now iOS and Android. With ConnectedTVs and STBs support to come (already showed during MAX), the dream of the Open Screen project is becoming reality, at least in the game dev area (but also intensive graphic/media applications may leverage 2D/3D accelerations).
Therefore Adobe has concentrated the resources in a promising field where Flash could easily become leader. In 2D/3D browser gaming it is just leader (500Million players on Facebook may be sufficient as business card ?) . Try by yourself searching for Stage3D demo in YouTube to see the huge amount of interest for this technology from any game developers (big and small).
The second strong commitment of the platform is for video delivery where Flash has been leader in the past 5 years and is still today. The performance of video decoding in the browser has been widely improved with a completely redesigned pipeline that now exploits mult-threading heavily. But most important, the support for accelerated H.264 streaming has been added to AIR for iOS using the standard Apple HLS (already supported by FMS 4.5 and Wowza Server).
During the spring Adobe will release the new version of Flash Access (now Adobe Access 4) that will include content protection for iOS devices (both in AIR and native application) in the form of DRM on HLS. This move has the potentiality to make Adobe re-gain the favor of majors and big content providers that would have the possibility to uniform DRMs across Android, iOS, Desktop Apps, Browsers, Google TV and some STBs.
The support for HW accelerated 2D, 3D and video playback on mobile, plus an improvement in performance for Flex applications, plus the possibility to integrate HTML5 contents with StageWebView, plus the DRM, plus native extentions, **finally**, makes AIR (for Mobile) an interesting, efficient, effective and valuable solution for cross platform application development.
(Updated 03 March 2012)
I think the platform is 99% complete now, which is very good, but I would like to see the following issues addressed ASAP to complete the features list of AIR for Mobile:
- H.264/AAC on RTMP : necessary for effecient real time video application, especially now that FP supports H.264 encoding.
- Echo cancellation : see the previous point.
- Effective and Robust support for key native features like InApp Purchase and Notification. I like Native Extentions’s idea but I’d prefer an official API for critical features like these.
- Better integration/communication between AS3 and JS in StageWebView. No more hacks please.
Make a comment if you think that there’s something else of important to add to AIR for Mobile/AIR for iOS.