What does Adobe Air bring to the table?

I’m sure some of you, as I was, are confused about what exactly Adobe Air is and what it does. I installed it and then it wasn’t in my launcher… so initially I was a bit confused. I have to admit I haven’t kept up on flashÂ developmentÂ and the announcement from Adobe that they were going to stop developing Flash for Android took me by surprise. But now that I’ve done some digging I think this is going to be a positive and not a negative.

For one we will be able to have apps that are cross-platform and have the same interface (or at least very similar) from one device to another. For instance Conqu. Conqu is a task manager (your personal and project tasks, not Android’s). It requires Adobe Air to run on your pc and on your Android device. I don’t want to fully review this app, but it will be very handy for me keeping track of house-hold chores, car maintenance, the infamous Honey-Do list and other tasks that I tend to forget about easily. Another app that I tried out is a game called Aqualux. It’s just a simple puzzle game, but the graphics are very high quality and it ranÂ extremelyÂ well with absolutely no lag what-so-ever. Tweetdeck is another desktop app that I hope gets written to Air for Android. I know there is already an apk for Tweetdeck, but it’s nowhere near as useful as the desktop app.

So why Air? Using Air, developers are able to make a desktop app, a tablet app, and a phone app all without lengthy development on each device. Once the app is written into air it’s easilyÂ transferredÂ to each platform. This includes apps for both PC, Mac, Android, and iOS devices. If I was a developer I would beÂ extremelyÂ excited about Air. I can write one program with a few variantsÂ to make it look good on phones, tabs and desktops and have itÂ compatibleÂ on all of the major platforms immediately without further development.

Some people are worried that this will cause confusion in the Android Market as some devices will be Air compatible and others will not. But I don’t think it’s that big of a deal, as long as devs clearly mark apps with a message that says something like, “Requires Adobe Air.” A link to Air within the description would also be helpful so that acquiring Air would be a seamless experience.

So far I’m impressed with the Air experience as well as the concept. I think the future of Air is bright and will inspire some great apps and games.