Today, Adobe released a statement titled “The Future of Adobe AIR” announcing that in this coming month of June, ongoing feature development and platform support would be moving to Harman – a company owned by Samsung:
As of June 2019, Adobe is transitioning ongoing platform support and feature development of AIR to HARMAN. This will coincide with an Adobe-issued update of AIR, v32, for supported mobile and desktop platforms.
Adobe provided some additional details in that:
Adobe will provide basic security support – limited to security fixes only for desktop platforms … for Adobe AIR v32 until the end of 2020. After that time, Adobe support for AIR will be discontinued and ongoing support will be managed by HARMAN and communicated by them directly.
The year of 2020 aligns exactly with the projected date at which Adobe has declared as end-of-life for Flash Player in the web browser. That doesn’t sound so great.
Harman has apparently performed a lot of unique work with Flash Player and AIR as a partner with Adobe over the years in developing and modifying the runtimes for various embedded systems: cars, refrigerators, televisions, et cetera.
Harman also released a statement reading as follows:
Starting in June 2019 with the release of AIR 33, HARMAN will be providing the platform support and feature development for the AIR runtime and the SDK. AIR 33 will support 64-bit Android devices and will be available on a commercial basis.
HARMAN will also provide bespoke and embedded versions of Adobe AIR for other platforms and products…
So that all sounds pretty good. 64-bit AIR… new features being developed… and a supported, active platform. Of course, to achieve this sort of support, they are opting to do something that Adobe was never able to successfully do… monetize the platform.
As soon as you bring up the question of commercializing something that was previously free for anyone to use… people understandably start worrying. However, this is one of the details that a Harman representative was quick to clarify a bit on Adobe’s forums:
The plan is for AIR SDK to be free to download and use for hobbyists/smaller developers i.e. having a ‘free tier’, and then charging for larger/commercial use. The charges are then used to fund our development team and so the more people who use it, the more we can develop it!
This sounds very much that students and general developers may have nothing to be concerned about. Considering for years that many developers have practically begged Adobe to commercialize the SDK in order to further development goals… this may not be a problem at all depending upon how everything is set up.
There are, of course, many questions with answers that remain unclear so early after these announcements have been made. Especially in regard to the use of AIR within Adobe Animate. Hopefully, in the coming days – we will receive clarity on this and other mysteries.
This agreement could either be the demise of Adobe AIR – or its resurrection. I certainly hope it turns out to be the latter.
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UPDATE [June 3rd 2019]: Regarding AIR and Animate moving forward: https://forums.adobe.com/message/11104268#11104268
“there are no changes to the existing support for the AIR-Adobe Animate workflow. The team will work with Harman on the way forward.”