zwetan but integrating the ANE features as native into AIR, sorry but no
external libraries, whether AS3 or ANE should be kept external, as options
the things you want native in AIR are things that can not be done otherwise
and that are shared by all the plateforms: iOS, Android, macOS, Windows
I'm comfortable seeing differently on this point. I mean, ultimately it's not like it's up to us anyway, so I continue because it's nice to be talking positively about the future of AIR for a change.
I personally think drawing a line on things that are external, needing to stay that way, perhaps misses the point. Everything could be external. AIR isn't needed at all. The entire app could be written in C++. The point is, AIR provides rapid development tools, so we don't have to resort to laboriously building apps in C++. I accept that a line must be drawn (presumably by Harman), but I'd prefer it be based on cost benefit analysis, or popularity and time saved for developers (what it's worth to us), or performance benefits. This has nothing to do with whether or not the same could be achieved via ANE, because the answer will almost always be yes... but so what?
Should the SDK not have ever included support for microphone, web view, css, camera video capture, GPS, accelerometer, screen dimming, virtual keyboard, camera roll, screen orientation, H.264 encoding, TLS/SSL sockets, UDP networking, JPEG-XR image format, G.711 audio compression, JSON, encrypted local storage, workers, bytearray LZMA compression, push notifications, game input, socket server, hardware video decoding, secure socket, echo cancellation, game controllers, spherical video support, better printing, audio device management and probably more?
Most, perhaps even all of these things could be achieved through the use of libs, ANE's or a native process. Some even were before Adobe incorporated them into the native SDK. I've used many of these things many times and I'm glad they're a part of the native SDK. I only suggest that there may yet be more things that warrant inclusion.