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Is Adobe Falling Behind in Mobile?
| By Rich Tretola | January 23, 2009 | |
| 5,105 views |
Those who were at MAX know that it is no secret that Adobe is trying very hard to get the Flash Player and the AIR Runtime on to mobile platforms. Since there is not really any competition to the Flash Player within the browser, I have no doubt that it will be a dominating force within the mobile browser space once it is available.
There are many different operating systems within the mobile space and each has a different language to create installable applications. For example, in order to deploy to Windows Mobile, iPhone, and Android, you would need to be able to write your applications in .NET Compact Framework, Objective C, and Java respectfully. And, that list doesn’t even account for Blackberry and Palm. This presents a huge challenge to be able to accommodate a large population of mobile users.
Like Java tried to do with desktop development with the Java Virtual Machine, Adobe has a huge opportunity with mobile via the Adobe AIR Runtime. Adobe has already been successful with AIR on the desktop, deploying to many different versions of Windows, OS X, and Linux allowing developers to work in a familiar environment and deploy across multiple operating systems with relatively little differences in the development process.
If Adobe can get the AIR Runtime installed to the major mobile operating systems, this could be the holy grail of mobile application development. No doubt this is a huge challenge both technically and probably even more so politically. However, each day that goes by I see more developers moving away from Adobe products to work in mobile application development. My fear is that by the time AIR on mobile becomes a reality, it will be too late to make the big splash that it could if it were available today.
As a developer it would be nice to know where to focus my efforts for the future. Should I be developing my knowledge of Objective C for iPhone development, or Java Android development or can I count on being able to reuse my current skills with Adobe products. So with that in mind, I would love for Adobe to be able to publicly answer these questions.
- What is the current state of progress of AIR for mobile?
- Can you publish a projected timeline for when you feel the first devise will be ready to install the AIR Runtime?
- With the amount of money that is produced by the App Store, would a company like Apple ever allow the AIR runtime on their products?
Topics: Adobe AIR, Flash Player, Flex | 6 Comments »
January 23rd, 2009 at 5:44 pm
Hi Rich, today we’ve got statement-of-intent, but no partner timetables for device delivery, sorry. Think of it more like long-term guidance than as a product press release.
Best info is the Adobe commitment at Open Screen Project, which emphasizes that we must find ways to grow beyond today’s mobile fragmentation:
http://www.openscreenproject.org/
Right now the most immediate work is getting Player 10 onto smartphones. That’s a prerequisite for AIR. Intel has committed to AIR for Internet TV, and ARM is optimizing its chips for AIR too, but such system-level support must occur before devices using such systems can ship.
About trend curves, I’m a little more sanguine… it’s the capability of the devices which is the gating factor. Player/mobile (and beyond that AIR/mobile) are targeting smartphones, and will not run on the low-end feature-phones which have a fragmented J2ME implementation. There will always be low-end phones, but their development costs will be hard to reduce.
For the last question… you’ll have to ask Apple about that.
Summary: Sorry, I don’t have any shipping timetables today. We’ve got some long-term public guidance about how Adobe has committed its resources, and some partner indications, but no schedules yet, at least that I’ve seen.
jd/adobe
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Rich Tretola Reply:
January 23rd, 2009 at 8:14 pm
Thanks for your response John. I appreciate your time and the information you were able to share. I have great anticipation for what is to come next in the mobile market and really want AIR to be a driving force.
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January 23rd, 2009 at 6:19 pm
Regarding last question, I suggest you take a look at Keith Peters’ blog http://www.bit-101.com/blog/
Keith been an hard core Flash developer and experimenter for quite a few years and he’s been able to port several of his projects, knowing nothing of Objective-C and iPhone programming, in just a few weeks.
Why you should wait for something that will just emulate 3D when you can use the full power of an hardware assisted openGL renderer?
Why emulate GUI when you have one of the slickest interface toolkit on the market that provides with powerful components, layered views with hardware assisted compositing and so on?
Why creating software applications with technologies not capable of handling, for example, multitouch?
As these days of crisis should have made clear, knowing one language, one platform and one player is probably not a safe bet.
Regarding last comment on J2ME fragmentation, probably it is wise to analyze the FlashLite one, with 5 different versions still actively on the market with different set of capabilities even within the same version layer (some display wallpaper, some don’t, some do video, some don’t)
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January 24th, 2009 at 9:01 pm
Rich, a very timely question! My interview with Adobe’s Anup Murarka on the Open Screen Project was just posted on the UI Resource Center.
http://uiresourcecenter.com/rich-internet-applications/articles/inside-the-open-screen-project.html?s=2_1
As for timelines, the OSP is aiming for a first release in Q4 2009, so accounting for product pipeline delays that really mean mid 2010. This is embedded land remember, so it takes a while for ecosystem changes to percolate from hub to spoke.
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January 27th, 2009 at 4:06 pm
Falling Behind? Were they ever even in contention? I know that Adobe marketing is going to say FlashLite is on a billion devices, but — at least here in the states — I don’t know any users of a Flash application on any device that supports them. I don’t even know any developers who’ve used it more than a prototyping tool.
Besides, I’m going to be curious how AIR works out on mobile platforms. I have yet to see an AIR app that isn’t a memory hog. My favorite, TweetDeck, never uses less that 120 megs of memory on my desktop. Seems like as JD said above, there’s a lot of upcoming work that’s crucial to get this dialed in.
I’m a big fan of AIR and the dream of write-once, run everywhere mantra. And I’d especially appreciate figuring out a way for one runtime to run on multiple platforms, but…who knows.
For now, I know that as long as mobile applications can easily be created in a few weeks for each platform, that having the write-once, run everywhere isn’t as important. Looking at the future with the potential for ever increasing mobile application complexity, that’s a different story…
I also believe that the AIR architecture needs to be extendability through some form of native-plugins so that when AIR is running on 5 different platforms, it can still access native APIs somehow. (Just thinking out loud here.) And then naturally for the mobile devices, getting into support for touch, multi-touch, integrated data, etc… I’d like to see AIR be able to get us 90% of the way there, then the fine-tuned integration into each device, which gives the polished user experience for the last 10%…
For example, with Windows 7 and the new Jump Lists functionality, I’d be nice if one developer could write a plugin that the AIR runtime could access for providing this functionality on Win 7 machines, maybe someone else writes a plugin to access OSX finder, etc???
Anyway, I’m hoping that Adobe gets some traction with this as the more the mobile platform grows and takes over most our computing platform, the more need for better development tools/runtimes…
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February 15th, 2010 at 4:36 am
Damned good sets of points there, and again it seems that everyone from the user through to the Developer (or vice versa) says the same things that the problems are dowm to a harmonised finger freindly interace and good developmental libraries. Well just have cross fingers and see what transpires!
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