Adobe's AIR is one of the best ways to build & deploy cross-platform mobile apps right now
As someone who has built and deployed a cross-platform app on AIR, I must respectfully disagree.
AIR doesn't give you access to a lot of native features of smartphones. As the most glaring oversight, I had to do some deep hacking on AIR's launcher to support in-app billing. Phonegap's extensible plugin approach looks a lot easier.
And the user experience is different, too. After months of work, my first review rolled in: one star, and said simply, "AIR crap." And no wonder. Without so much as the ability to display my own splashscreen beforehand, AIR simply asks the user, "Hi, would you like to do a 16 MB download to support this app that you don't even know what it does yet?" I've had my friends give me funny looks at that prompt. "When I'm done looking at this, I can delete that, right?" one of them asked.
If you do Phonegap -- or heck, even just raw HTML5 -- I'm not sure your users even need to know.
Yikes - sounds very similar to trying to deploy Java desktop apps. Not a pleasant experience. Why don't they just bake the AIR runtime into the original download? Sure it would be bigger and you'd end up with duplicate copies, but almost anything is better than trying to get end users to download runtimes.
Well, 16 MB is a really quite a nasty large size for an app. For reference, one of the low-end phones I target has 180MB of internal memory. (And I don't think I can tell an app -- and certainly not an AIR app -- to install itself on the SD card, though a wizardly user certainly can.) You can get away with 16 MB in a graphics-heavy game, but something that's mostly forms and screens really ought to come in under a megabyte.
Phonegap gets to bundle the platform because their hello world is only 300k. I really don't think AIR could get away with that.
But I agree, the user experience might be better if that was an option.
You can bundle the runtime with your app to avoid this. Also trying to use a feature that exists only on one platform isn't really cross-platform, that said AIR does support Native Extensions to do exactly that. They aren't hard to write, I was involved in the beta program to help write the first ones.
That's good to know. I suppose my experience with AIR was about a year ago--right when they first came out with support for mobile--which is about two decades in phone years. And it sounds like my research wasn't complete.
Nonetheless, between a heavyweight and power-hungry executable, an expensive editor, and a scripting language and library for which the most complimentary term I have is "quirky", I really don't understand how AIR is considered even a serious contender in the space of cross-platform . . . platforms. Let alone the best.
As someone who has built and deployed a cross-platform app on AIR, I must respectfully disagree.
AIR doesn't give you access to a lot of native features of smartphones. As the most glaring oversight, I had to do some deep hacking on AIR's launcher to support in-app billing. Phonegap's extensible plugin approach looks a lot easier.
And the user experience is different, too. After months of work, my first review rolled in: one star, and said simply, "AIR crap." And no wonder. Without so much as the ability to display my own splashscreen beforehand, AIR simply asks the user, "Hi, would you like to do a 16 MB download to support this app that you don't even know what it does yet?" I've had my friends give me funny looks at that prompt. "When I'm done looking at this, I can delete that, right?" one of them asked.
If you do Phonegap -- or heck, even just raw HTML5 -- I'm not sure your users even need to know.