It’s really a shame that hardly anyone outside of the development community understands what Adobe AIR is, because it is actually pretty damn cool. Flash enables web content in your mobile browser, and that’s all fine and good. But those experiences are still stuck in your browser. They still exist as merely part of a web page where touch controls could easily become confused between interacting with Flash content and the browser as a whole. Bring those experiences out of the browser and now we’re cooking. And that is exactly what Adobe AIR achieves.
AIR allows any Flash developer who is willing to do a bit of tweaking to their applications and games and optimize them for a mobile environment to package up those experiences into a standard issue Android APK file. This APK can then be distributed how any other application file can. From the Android Market? Sure. From a third party website? Absolutely. Flash by itself is good and all, but AIR is where it’s at for mobile.
Adobe’s Aaron Filner was kind enough to demo just a few examples of AIR in action at the Adobe Android Summit this week, which I so graciously recorded and uploaded to Youtube for all to enjoy. The actual content being showcased might not get your juices flowing, but the possibilities AIR opens up have to get you a bit excited.