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What Is Adobe AIR for Android?

First, some background on Adobe Air (from Adobe Air’s official site):

Adobe® AIR® will let you publish ActionScript 3 projects to run as native applications (.apk) for the Android OS. These AIR applications can be delivered to Android devices through Android application stores such as the Android Market.

Developers can write new code or reuse existing web content to build AIR applications for the Android OS. Because the source code and assets are reusable across the Flash Platform runtimes, Adobe AIR and Flash Player, it also gives developers a way to more easily target other mobile and desktop environments

The result for end users is that they get full featured applications that are easy to for their developers to support and are compatible with most operating systems out of the box.

For developers it means an additional method of creating applications. If you’re not happy with the Native SDK but are used to working with ActionScript then this is a great opportunity to use those same skills to add to the Android Marketplace – when you export your app you can submit it to the Market as a standard Android application.

Where To Get It

You can grab the leaked copy of Adobe AIR for Android from here. It should work on Android 2.1 and 2.2.

What It Is and How To Use It

When it’s installed you probably won’t notice any difference – not even an extra icon in your apps menu! That’s because it’s not an app itself; AIR is a platform that lets you install and run applications created using AIR on your phone. You can download some example Android AIR applications from here

I Want to Make An AIR App!

If you’re a developer who is interested in creating an AIR application then join the Official Adobe AIR prerelease programme here. Once registered you’ll have the opportunity to download the latest AIR builds for you phone, download the Adobe Flash CS5 extension to easily package your app into a .apk file and access a user forum which can be used to gain support from other developers and also for sharing your apps to collect feedback.

What Kind of Apps Can I Expect?

Developers have already been sharing and demoing their applications on their private websites. Here’s a few examples:

qubeStack – 3D Tetris (link)

qubestack

Pogz - (link)

POGZ_screen_3

Reversi – (link)

reversi_landscape

Source: Droid-Life for the download links