AIR Roadmap Update

liquidate

Hello AIR and Starling developers,

With the news today regarding Flash Player, I'm sure many of you have questions regarding AIR and its future roadmap. Let me start by saying that today's announcement was not about AIR, and instead focuses entirely on Flash Player and the browser plugin environment. Adobe remains committed to AIR and we believe it continues to be a great desktop and mobile development platform.

Many of you have asked for a roadmap update. We hope to have our official Flash Runtime roadmap updated soon, but until then I wanted to share some of the features we'd like to accomplish in our upcoming releases. As always, this list may change as we receive feedback from the community.

Support for 64-bit AIR – Windows Captive Only
AIR SDK installer on Windows
Desktop async texture upload
DirectX11 support for AIR desktop
Increase the GPU memory texture limit
Improved monitor and resolution settings for AIR Desktop
GPU render mode for AIR Desktop
Support for the latest SDK on iOS 11 and Android O
ASTC Support for mobile
VR/AR support for AIR apps
ANE support for Swift on iOS
METAL bindings for Stage3D
Motion detection for Android devices

We've also been following the feature request thread on these forums (https://forum.starling-framework.org/topic/air-in-2016-survey-and-christmas-tale). We wanted to get your feedback on some of the items outlined by you guys. If you'd like to provide additional input, please take a minute and take this three question survey so we can better understand what folks would like to see in future releases.

https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/MG78K53

liquidate

For those that haven't seen the Flash Player update - https://blogs.adobe.com/conversations/2017/07/adobe-flash-update.html

wolfofpavlov

Where did you get your information? You're new to this forum, are you an Adobe employee? I see nothing in today's announcement that directly says AIR is fine and Adobe is committed to it... besides just assuming this.

EDIT... sorry I had no idea liquidate was Adobe

Jeff

um, liquidate is Chris Campbell 🙂

joshtynjala

liquidate is Chris Campbell, the Flash product manager from Adobe.

wolfofpavlov

Well that's at least reassuring. Thanks for clarifying

FlashFix

We need a simple way to export to HTML5 with Adobe Air...
Like Google Swiffy did for SWF
https://developers.google.com/swiffy/

I have been asking for this feature for the last 5 years and I am not alone.

Please find a way to do this.

I will pray.

rewb0rn

I agree an HTML5 export target for Air (i.e. a replacement for Flash) would have the highest priority for us right now. Anyone who is interested can vote here:
https://tracker.adobe.com/#/view/AIR-4178275

Daniel

Thanks a lot for clarifying this, Chris!

While it's sad to have it confirmed, I think many of us expected that something like this would happen sooner or later. With the browser vendors making it harder and harder to run Flash content – something that's out of Adobe's control – you were in a battle that you couldn't really win.

Personally, I like to think that freeing those resources might actually be a good thing for the AIR platform – allowing you to focus on its needs exclusively.

I do feel with all the developers who have big Flash projects up and running, though. This is going to a tough transition. 😐

liquidate

Sorry for the confusion about who the post was from! As others mentioned, I work on the Flash engineering team and help with communications.

I hear you on the HTML5 target output and I'll bring this feedback to the team. I'm also very familiar with the feature request in the Adobe Tracker and like rewb0rn, would encourage others to provide their feedback as they see fit.

Thanks,
Chris Campbell

ozmachine

So many good memories with Flash. However, I haven't worked in the browser space for years. I love making AIR apps. If only the world could see how beautiful the AIR development experience can be.

Meanwhile, they can have that "wild west" of HTML5 development. I made many great things, there, but the headache was too great.

Nilpointer

Now (or then in 2020) that there is no need to support legacy swfs (as2/flex) maybe the road to some kind of AS4 would be open?

IPv6

Great to hear AIR will not be faded away with Flash Player. It is a great platform, still superior to others in many ways - simple yet feature-rich.

Flash Player, on the other side... There is no surprise its lifetime hit the end, finally. It`s all to the best, i hope ))

bwhiting

It would be good if they had mentioned Air in that post.
Still it would be great if it meant Air got more focus, the roadmap looks good! I would like to see enhanced performance (been requesting this for such a long time - not even sure if it is possible, particularly how slow vector/array/bytearray/dictionary access is)
Also being able to target game consoles would be epic and bring in a huge number of devs I think. Maybe integrate bullet 😃

liquidate

One of the things I'd like to focus on with AIR is stability/performance/quality. Daniel was kind enough to recently create a Github issue page(https://github.com/Gamua/Adobe-Runtime-Support/issues) that both the community and Adobe can use to easily prioritize/vote/comment on issues. I'd be happy to have a release or two simply focus on bugs if we can get a concrete set of issues defined and reproduced.

dannycortesv

Thanks Adobe for continue supporting AIR, thanks Chris, Daniel and Josh for your commitment, we are all building great projects with AIR / Starling / Feathers, this is such an amazing tech.

tuarua

Whilst the news about Flash Player in the browser is invariably sad I don't think it was unexpected.
However, the news and reassurance that this doesn't affect support for AIR is very welcome. Thanks Chris + Adobe.
I, like others, think this could lead to more focus towards AIR. It's such great tech.

Regarding the upcoming proposed feature list - there are some exciting things in there especially related to GPU, Metal, VR/AR and aligning with latest Android and iOS versions.
With a strong core framework and the ability to extend via ANEs with whatever else is needed the platform really is killer.
On a personal note I am really interested to see how the Swift support transpires as I managed to implement already albeit with some hurdles.

One thing on the survey that really caught my eye was "Access Stage3D directly from an ANE" If this would allow rendering a native GPU context onto a Texture that would be amazing. Like running Unreal Engine in an ANE and having it part of the Starling display list.

tobex

Thank you for clarifications, Chris, also thank you Daniel, Josh, and whole Adobe Air crew for keeping AIR and Starling alive. Roadmap is impressive like always, and I hope in the future you will find some time to work on compiler that generates js so we can write as3 for web again, but even without that, AIR is fantastic. Flash player defined RIA for browsers, and even if he didn't deserve early retirement that he got, he paved great road for AIR, and I believe we are yet to enjoy great apps and games made with AIR and Starling!

jeggert

Chris I appreciate you updating this thread... as soon as I heard the news this was the first place I checked to see if there was any update on AIR... the Adobe announcement doesn't mention it at all (Which I think is a mistake).

In the past Adobe has not done a stellar job of communication in terms of the AIR development community i.e. lack of a current roadmap. Hopefully this improves. Even if it wasn't known that Adobe was going to announce an EOL date for Flash, most people saw the writing on the wall with the decisions of the major browsers blocking Flash by default. Adobe should have been continually reassuring the development community that AIR was not going away - that should have been happened a long time ago (and maybe it did and I missed it).

Keeping the community in the dark or being indecisive is not good - If Adobe doesn't let us (as a community) know what they intend to do, individual developers and companies have, and will, migrate to the known vs unknown, i.e. other runtimes and languages such as Unity/C#, Haxe/OpenFL etc.

Hopefully it's not too late and AIR doesn't whither up and die.

rewb0rn

Thanks for acknowledging the HTML5 output feature request and bringing it to the team, Chris. We are building online games for mobile and web, mostly with Air and Flash, but we are already developing our first title in Unity which we plan to release Q1 2018. If no HTML output for Air is announced soon, we will fully rotate to Unity or another crossplatform solution that is able to handle this requirement.

However we would be happy to skip this hassle and pledge what I consider a substantial amount of money to Air if we get an HTML target in return (say 5 digits a year), and we are probably not the only ones. Feel free to contact me if that is something you would like to discuss further.

Kind regards,
Ruben