16 June 2011

AIR for Android (almost) on SD

From Alessandro, AIR 2.7 for Android was released 2 days ago...
The main changement I quickly jumped to was the ability to AT LAST move the runtime to the SD Card.

I was about to post about the real problem of this runtime : its size.
I made a quick stats on the french Android Market and about half of the comment are something like "too heavy and don't know what it is needed for so... deleted!"
On the other half, half (so 1/4 of the total comment) claimed they use a custom ROM (the infamous Cyanogen) to move the runtime on the SD.
You see the point : about 3/4 of the comments are talking about the size of the runtime. It also means 1/2 of users deleted the runtime...and so won't install it anymore even if you publish an awesome (air) app/game.
Note I don't know if it's the same in US or UK, I only talk about France.

So, I was more than happy when reading the news 2 days ago!
Hélàs, my happiness was equal to my sadness when I finally updated AIR on my Desire : of the 16Mo of the runtime, ONLY 5Mo are moveable to the SD card....
Come on! It's better but far to solve the "too heavy" criticism!

I think you could argue Google Maps is almost the same size...but I think you can't compare this because Google Maps is Google Maps (people want it) where AIR is ... what? (1/3 of people don't even know what the need for!)

16Mo for the runtime plus x Mo for any basic app generated with Flex 4.5
The more I use this solution, the more I think it's not the good way....
AIR shouldn't be needed and the apk generated should be (translated) native code.
I finally found a middleware which do so... I'll give it a try next month I think.
Note Adobe is able to do this, look at Wallaby (Flash to HTML5) for example....