How can I develop mobile apps using Flash?

Question

I ask this because I was looking at Flash and AIR, and the alleged deadness of Flash mobile and so on. What I was pretty sure was true is that mobile for Flash was no more.

Then I looked at Adobe's site and saw this,

I don't understand. The page says,

"The Adobe® Flash® Player runtime lets you effortlessly reach more than 1 billion connected desktops across browsers and operating systems with no additional software installation — 11 times more people than the best-selling hardware game console. Use the Adobe AIR® runtime to package the same code into native apps for iPhone, iPad, and Android™ devices such as the Kindle Fire and Nook Tablet, reaching over 500 million devices."

I'm confused. Can I develop for mobile with Adobe Flash?

Answer 1

Yes. I do it for a living. The Adobe AIR SDK allows you to package/compile your apps for iOS, Android, Windows, and OS X (with outdated first party support for BlackBerry and updated third party support for BlackBerry 10)

You'll need an IDE (Flash Builder (the recommended Adobe-developed IDE), Flash Develop, non-community edition IntelliJ, Flash Pro, etc) and the Adobe AIR SDK. It isn't as straight forward as normal Flash as you have to be concerned about a lot more than with web-based SWFs, but it is just Flash. Pretty much anything you can do in Flash, you can do in AIR. You don't have access to much native functionality, but that is what AIR Native Extensions are for. It is AS3-only, so no ActionScript 2 may be used

It should be noted that it is highly recommended by Adobe to not use Timeline-based Flash for AIR for Mobile projects, as it is not at all optimized for mobile. Stick to strictly OOP-based projects. Additionally, if you are making a game, you should look into using something like Starling.

And the Flash Player for mobile is no more. Adobe AIR is alive and well. Adobe releases sizable updates every few months and has kept up with the latest OS versions fairly well, usually having an update that completes support within a few days of the final release (3.9 was released a week after iOS 7, for example)

Also worth noting that the majority of the Apache Flex SDK (formerly developed by Adobe) is optimized for mobile and works incredibly well if you take the time to properly learn it