Is Adobe Air still actively supported?

Is Adobe AIR's technology suitable for developing reliable two-way video call - application?

• We are currently testing a custom made application that provides – among other features - two-way video call functionality between a mobile device (Android or iOS) and a web browser. The application has been developed using Adobe AIR and compiled to mobile platforms. Compared to free video call software like Skype, Yahoo M, Google Talk, etc. we are experiencing two major issues: 1) Delay is worse than expected. Usually it’s between 2.5 and 4 seconds that makes the conversation very fragmented. 2) Echo is disturbing. Loud echo appears on the browser side when the other party uses a mobile device. It’s caused by the fact that proper echo cancellation has not been implemented on the mobile device side in Adobe AIR. Test calls have been made on broadband connections: mobile device was either on wifi or on HSPDA+ with nice ping/dl/up rates. Skype and similar solutions performed seamlessly under the same conditions, on the very same devices. Because of these, user experience is quite unfavorable. Developer tried to tweak the software, also installed 3rd party software to decrease echo problem. No significant breakthrough has been reached so far. My question is: do you consider Adobe’s AIR technology to be suitable for this kind of video call functionality or is this a dead-end street? In case you do, do you have any recommendation for the developers, what to try, how to tweak the application to eliminate these issues? Or would you rather recommend integrating a technology different from Adobe AIR? All ideas are greatly appreciated! Thanks a lot in advance for your feedback!

• Answer:

  Hi, here is our feedback: In the past 4 months we tried to gather information about what is possible and which approach could be the right one (all based on AIR). Therefore we at first followed the development of Mark Doherty and his Radar app, thanks to the fact that he provided the sources for it. Based on that, we developed it a little bit further in order to find out which improvements seems to be possible to match a functionality which survives under real life conditions. If helpful, we gladly would like to share our relevant state of development, especially because it could draw a clearer picture of what we achieved so far (which is unfortunately not that much). In sum we have to conclude, that the given functionalities – even the ones of AIR 3.0 – are at least unsatisfactory. Because of that, we tried to achieve furthermore progress and spoke to several Adobe platform evangelists, directly with Adobe at IBC Amsterdam and to virtually anybody from whom we might suppose that he could be able to perform a meaningful contribution. Not too long aga we found The article of Hasan Otuome - regarding a similar topic - and decided to give it a try by following his guidelines by establishing the configuration described by him. The prerequisites we added was the application of: ·       Some Desktops and Laptops (as host for the desktop variant of the app) ·      HTC Desire HD, HTC Sensation, ·       Samsung Galaxy SII ·       iPhone 4 as well as iPod Touch 5th generation with iOS 5 installed ·       A lot of willingness as well as efforts to achieve our goal ·       And last but not least - our own scaleable cloudbased FMS Server What we found out so far is the following: ·       The video part of the stream runs smoother than ever and in a much more “real-time manner” than it does on the rtmfp server proposed by Mark Doherty ·        Unfortunately the audio part of the stream has not worked at the beginning - due to some permission problems - but we solved that. o  Android (HTC Sensation) – Android (HTC Desire HD): sometimes strange noise, seems that the microphone is addressed in a wrong way… o  Android – iPhone: more likely but also noisy and with an inacceptable latency, up to one minute of delay (directly related to the duration of the established call) o  Android – Desktop: again more likely but also noisy and with an inacceptable latency, up to one minute of delay... o  iPhone – Desktop: the best result of a chat with a mobile device involved, but still interrupted audio and somehow “pumping”, similar to some kind of “noise gate” or extremely compressed sound, coming in “waves” o   Desktop – Desktop: a Perfect video chat, smooth video, better and understandable srelatively smooth audio – the best result so far So – as you might imagine already – the now following next step is that we would like to ask Hasan Otume (this process is already started but ongoing at the moment) some questions regarding his experience with that topic, especially: - Was he able to demonstrate a working video chat at Adobe MAX, and if yes:    o  Which app hosts (devices) where involved?    o  Did he also discover audio problems and if yes what type of?    o  Has he dicovered problems regarding increasing latency/delay in relation to the duration of already established connections? ·  Does he think that the new “native extensions” of AIR could be a promising alternative to concentrate on, in regard of the elimination of these problems? ·  Does he think that Adobe is aware of all the problem details actually? ·   If Adobe already knows all about the necessary further improvements of AIR, when would you expect the release of it? So to wrap it up: we now think about testing whether the development of an native extension with native Android code in the background could help to sove the audio problem - but as far as we can see now - this probably is not too trivial... We also would like to know which 3rd party software you have tried out with exactly which results? So hopefully there will be a soluton to the audio problem soon... cheers from my side