Thanks to those who have recently registered to receive our updates. We are working still on a website, there are a number of internal formal steps we need to go through hence some delays I’m afraid, so for now we’ll keep communicating via emails (and thank you to those people who then share the information onto various forum posts!). As before, if you no longer want to be on the list of recipients, please reply by email and let us know.
As mentioned below, there were some issues with the AIR SDK beta that we released, and we have been working on this, particularly with the Animate team to ensure that we’ve got something that can be used with their existing releases. We’re trying to get a few more fairly key things into this so our original target of sending it out tomorrow may slip slightly. We’re still trying to have a very light touch in terms of quality control, just so that it’s in your hands as early as possible, so please bear with us while we focus on maturing the ARMv8 Android binaries in particular plus the SDK and build tools in general. The same will apply in terms of no distribution of this software until we’re satisfied with the quality levels so we will push the binaries out to those who are happy with the attached SDK license agreement. If you’ve not yet read and agreed to this, please reply with your confirmation and we can add you to the distribution list. (This is a slightly convoluted way of a website checkbox to say you’ve read and agree to the terms prior to download..)
We’re also been reviewing the feedback on the pricing plans that we published at the end of last week; thank you to those who have responded either via the forum posts or by email. We are looking to tweak the pricing structures a little in response to some of the feedback, but just to address a couple of points here:
1) we had planned to have pricing levels based on the revenue that you receive from the distribution of your AIR-based applications. This caused consternation both because of the potential issues for accounting, and for those whose business models are different from just creating and distributing their own applications. So we are likely to move to pricing based on overall revenue, with an associated adjustment of the various levels.
2) folk expressed concern at the idea of us having audit rights: this is perfectly standard, as those who have Unity subscriptions can testify to – but this doesn’t mean we will be auditing everybody! As a general rule this would only be invoked if we had major suspicions of a problem, for example if you were shipping the next Angry Birds or Slither.io but claiming to have tiny amounts of revenue, we might notice..
3) comparisons were drawn with Unity and the different levels there; I think because of the final ‘enterprise’ tier it caused a different comparison to what we had been looking at ($20/month for AIR vs $35/month for Unity for individuals; $99/month for AIR vs $125/month for Unity for professionals) but perhaps everyone is already earning above the extra revenue cap that we’d put in there for the professional level.. As mentioned above, we are looking at the pricing and tier levels again and perhaps will adjust how the subscription/tools usage is tied together to try to satisfy those who aren’t happy with this pricing.
4) we’re aware of the problems caused by the timescales, with the Android 64-bit Play Store requirements coming in so soon. We can only offer ours, and Adobe’s, apologies for this whole thing happening so late, it was a long process and we all wish that we were 6+ months earlier with everything. What we’re trying to do is to put AIR onto a commercially sustainable footing, which means ensuring that we can start to add features and improvements that are community-led. We will be putting together a roadmap shortly, when we get our website approved, which covers the short term and outlines some of our wish-list for the longer term.
There were some great suggestions sent in such as to have a ‘lite’ version of AIR with features stripped back, for a low price: things like this are definitely under consideration but would be a future step, as it’s quite a lot of effort to pull an individual feature out from the AIR codebase!