All mobile development tools have their pros and cons, but our evaluation of the situation have led us to these conclusions:
Having more than 25 combined years of Flex development experience between my three-man team, about half that in mobile AIR, we somehow got very good along the way and can knock out new mobile apps and add features quickly without stress or climbing new learning curves. When you use the same tool for that long you develop your own extensive libraries, frameworks, widgets, utilities, etc., and you fine tune them during every new project. Switching platforms now would cost us dearly in learning curves, waiting on functionality from tool vendors, working around various limitations, developing our own foundation of code, etc., and we figure it would take a few years to get to where we'd be as fast as we are today. None of the tools out there are so significantly better, faster, quicker than Flex/AIR that we'd realize significantly improved development velocity or app performance. We have a number of apps we maintain and switching platforms means we have to maintain the old ones on AIR as long as possible, while learning a new stack. We believe this will drastically reduce overall development velocity. We do not see a business reason to rewrite existing apps on a new platform. Cross platform mobile app tools are jockeying for position and some will fail by the time we need to switch, so deciding on any one platform now is a waste of time. New tools are showing up with great promise, but they have a lot of maturing to do to reach parity with AIR/Flex. Xamarin is mature and would be one we'd look at when the time comes, but who knows what this space will look like in a few years. In conclusion, we have decided to ride the AIR train as long as possible, and if paying a vendor to maintain AIR gets us more life out of our IP and investment in our tech stack, then that's what we will do. It makes sense to pay for value. We've had a free ride on AIR for so long, that it's only right we pay for what we get, and with someone maintaining it for profit, we may not need so many ANEs, and it may be a lot less painful to deal with Apple/Google whims to piss off all of us with new requirements. I'd pay a lot to have someone else deal with Apple/Google headaches. And it makes sense for Adobe to get out of the business anyway. They have been so gracious for so many years, maintaining it with virtually no revenue stream other than AMS licenses for folks using AIR to serve video (correct me if I'm wrong and there is some hidden revenue stream Adobe gets for maintaining AIR--but I doubt it exists). This move was inevitable, and we are quite optimistic that we'll get another 5+ years out of our current mobile tech stack. We'll switch when the business decision becomes compelling, not before. But for folks who don't have a lot invested in AIR, their business decision could be very different. My $.02. Cheers, Erik On Jun 12, 2019, at 7:00 AM, hugo <hferreira...@gmail.com> wrote: This can't be bad for AIR, comparing to the current state. AIR is beeing in maintenance mode for least the last 2 years. I was just waiting for them to officially end it. Unfortunately Android x64 bits thing and the Adobe silent for so long until almost until the dead line forced me to evaluate other options and I did it. I'm moving from Flex/AIR on Mobile to Xamarin so it's hard to go back to Flex/AIR on Mobile after this and I believe that many others are doing the same, skrinking even futher the Flex comunity. Xamarin, it's a complete new fresh paradigm for better, I must say. Even so, Flex/AIR, on Desktop for me, continue to be the best option. Desktop market is stable (comparing with Mobile). I still don't understand why this was made silent for so long time ! It's not the launching of a rocket (even that, would be less secret !). It was all too exaggerated, unnecessary and the result it's on your front. -- Sent from: http://apache-flex-users.2333346.n4.nabble.com/ -- Message protected by MailGuard: e-mail anti-virus, anti-spam and content filtering.http://www.mailguard.com.au
