Creating Cross-Platform Adobe AIR Apps to Get Them Published on App Store

by Valery PesetskiJanuary 23, 2013

This blog post shares an example of an app created with Adobe AIR SDK that can be migrated to Android, iOS, or Blackberry with minimum efforts.

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Toward cross-platform development

For a long time, Apple used to restrict employing third-party tools for building iOS applications. Therefore, thousands of apps were pending approval and could not reach end users. In September 2010, the company softened its policy. That was a milestone that started a new chapter of cross-platform development.

“We have listened to our developers and taken much of their feedback to heart. This should give developers the flexibility they want, while preserving the security we need.” —Apple

However, skeptics argued that it would be hardly possible to create an Adobe Flash-based app that would be competitive to native Objective-C apps. Although it would be developed one day, it will not be accepted by the Apple App Store. This blog post features an example of an entertainment app that was developed with Adobe AIR 3.5. It is already published on iTunes, Google Play, and Facebook. A user can download the application to test its performance and usability.

Adobe-based app available for iOS and Android

The application allows users to play with pictures that were already uploaded to a device or have been just taken with the camera. With a tap of their finger, users can smudge images to make them look funny. After that, these amusing pictures can be shared on Facebook.

Adobe AIR SDK-based application

To develop this application, we used the following default AIR SDK features and Flex components:

horizontal lists, buttons, mobile views, work with images
image galleries and CameraRoll
a front-end and back-end camera
files
different DPI and screens of different devices
integration with Facebook API

By implementing the app, we exemplified that cross-platform applications created with AIR can exist beyond Adobe’s presentations. This framework enables developers to write code once and then migrate a ready-to-use application to Android, iOS, or Blackberry with minimum changes. It considerably reduces the development time and costs, since a single Flash/Flex developer can replace a team of Android, iOS, or Blackberry specialists.

Valery Pesetsk is Head of Flex Department at Altoros. Since 2006, he has been involved in software development and research. Valery has strong knowledge of cross-platform web development for mobile and desktop, as well as solid skills in code review, refactoring, performance improvement, unit and integration testing, and build automation. He can boast of vast experience in consulting, as well as strong product owner and team management skills.