This week at the Google I/O conference Adobe announced that a Flash Player 10.1 beta and an Adobe AIR prerelease are now available for Android devices. This is really exciting news for those of us building apps on the Flash Platform because now we can begin building apps in Flex for these mobile devices (and many others coming soon).
Take a look a some of the quick demos I’ve built with Flex running on Android in Flash Player and AIR:
You can get the source code for all of these demos from github.
Also Christophe Coenraets has posted some great Flex mobile demos. Check out his Employee Directory and Stock Trader demos.
These are very exciting times for developers!
If you want to check out the Flash Player 10.1 beta for Android it will be available in the Android Marketplace for Android 2.2 devices. You can try Adobe AIR for Android today by signing up for the prerelease.
18 Comments
Too bad he’s cheating! ;o)
Since there is no UI toolkit for mobile apps, he’s forced to tinker something with a big sliding group. This is nowhere nearly as productive and robust as iPhone view controllers. Do you know where we are with Slider?
Flex works fine as a UI toolkit for mobile apps. :) I’ve also tried Reflex, Razorberry, Minimal Components, etc and they all work well. Slider is actively being developed.
How are default CheckBox or DropDownList adapted to a small touch screen? Sure we can develop skins but it should be more straightforward. How about specifying a keyboard type (email address, numeric, etc.) for text fields?
There is still more work to do to optimize the components and development experience for mobile profiles and interaction models. But the basic building blocks are there now.
This is great! While I don’t have a device I do have an emulator with Android 2.2 but there is no Marketplace app for the emulator and Flash 10.1 isn’t installed. Anyone been able to get it installed on the emulator?
Great demo,
The touch screen response performance doesn’t seem as fluid as most iphone apps though.
These are still beta / prerelease runtimes and Flex hasn’t been optimized yet for mobile devices. So responsiveness should continue to improve as the runtimes and Flex are more optimized.
One question James,
I may in the future compile AIR applications for Android directly from Adobe Flex SDK?
Thanks!
The Flex SDK contains the AIR SDK. But the Flex SDK’s that are in production today don’t have the required AIR SDK version to create Android apps. If you join the AIR for Android prerelease you can download the newest AIR SDK and overlay it on top of an existing Flex SDK. Then you can create Android apps in the Flex / AIR SDK. Make sense?
Hi James
How to make an Android apk from an air app? I have made a sample air app with air2.5 sdk but I can’t get an apk , I tried this on windows :
adt -package -target apk -storetype pkcs12 -keystore
certificat.p12 -storepass mypassword AirGrid
AirGrid-app.xml AirGrid.swf icons
Thanks for your help
That should work. Are you getting an error?
Thanks! :-)
I have been at this for weeks. I am using Flex Builder 4. When I change my compiler to use my newly created flex sdk it does not build the air package. Only when I use 4.0.0 does it build the air package. my problem is that the package namespace is not 2.5. So I am sure that I need to build the package using a different sdk (I thought I did it right) ? Is this even possible to get it to run on my HTC Incredible?
note: My original mxml file has both as3 and flex tags does that matter?
Do you have the latest AIR 2.5 Prerelease overlaid on your Flex SDK? That will enable you to use the 2.5 namespace and target an apk file. Using AS3 and MXML is fine. You app should run on an HTC Incredible when it’s updated to Android 2.2 / FroYo.
I have all these things: latest Adobe Air from prerelease on my phone. I made my app into an apk file. There do not seem to be any bugs. The app works great in Air on the desktop. So when I go to my apps on my phone I see my cool icon and try and launch the app. I get a Sorry your application MyApp process app.MyApp has stopped unexpectedly. So my app wont work on a phone? When Or Will my HTC Incredible get Android 2.2? And will I just go to the marketplace or will it happen over the air?
I even stripped my app down to be just a panel with text that says “hi”. I get the same error
Thanks
George
You must have Android 2.2. I’m not sure when it will be available for your phone.
So all the prerelease builds does not really work?
Step1:-
adt -certificate -cn SelfSign -ou Dev -o “Example” -c US 2048-RSA cert.pfx password
Step2:-
adt -package -target apk -storetype pkcs12 -keystore ../codesigningCert.p12 HelloWorld.apk HelloWorld-app.xml HelloWorld.swf
EX:-
C:\Documents and Settings\Admin\Adobe Flash Builder 4\HelloWorld\bin-debug>adt -
package -target apk -storetype pkcs12 -keystore cert.pfx HelloWorld.apk HelloWor
ld-app.xml HelloWorld.swf
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