Adobe is releasing AIR for smartphone platforms, starting with Blackberry and Android. After announcing that Flash CS5 would allow developer to build iPhone apps, Adobe is now pushing its platform onto other devices. While purists may squirm at the idea of building apps with something like AIR it will allow true multi-platform mobile development by the large and already heavily invested Flash development community. From Gizmodo:
Android’s the first to get AIR, but WebOS, BlackBerrry and Windows Mobile are slated to get it too. And remember Adobe’s initiative to push Flash apps onto the App Store for the iPhone? Apps developed for that will work just fine in AIR on other phones, letting Adobe have their iPhone cake and eat it too.
TechCrunch also wrote about this:
The bane of all mobile app developers is the need to rewrite the same app over and over again for different devices: the iPhone, Android, Blackberry, Palm Pre, Nokia, Windows Mobile. Adobe is positioning its Flash platform (which includes the Flash player, AIR, developer tools, and media servers) as the write-once, deploy-anywhere solution for both the mobile Web and apps.
