Adobe: 200m mobile devices to support AIR this year
Flash's tablet and smartphone installbase rising in war with Apple
Adobe believes over 200 million smartphones and tablets will support AIR-based applications by the end of this year.
Runtime environment AIR allows, amongst other features, the operation of Flash-based apps and games on a broad range of mobile devices. Currently, Android is the primary platform for this.
It is the cornerstone of Adobe's cold war against Apple, with the latter famously refusing to support Flash on its iOS devices. However, it has recently relented – now at least allowing exported versions of apps that originated in Flash/AIR.
Adobe's senior vice president David Wadhwani told VentureBeat that over 20 million smartphones with Flash 10.1 were shipped last year, with the platform itself having been downloaded some 7 million times from the Android Market.
Of the 200 million device projection, Adobe believes 132 million will be smartphones, with tablets constituting a large portion of the leftover.
In addition, developers had created some 1500 AIR-based Apps during the first two months of its availability for Android.