Developing Android Applications with Adobe AIR

Software

At the time of this writing, Android’s latest operating system is 3.0 and is called Honeycomb.

The process for upgrading the Android operating system is very different from the Apple model, which requires the device to be synced with iTunes. Android uses an “over the air approach” to push upgrades. Manufacturers slowly push upgrades to phones, sometimes over several months. Not all devices receive upgrades, so developing for established versions instead of recently released versions may guarantee you a broader audience.

If you are not sure what version is installed on your device, select Settings→About phone→Android version (on some devices, this information is available under “Software information”). Your phone system must have at least Android 2.2, called Froyo, to run AIR for Android. The Adobe AIR runtime is not accessible on the Android Market for earlier versions.

Performance

The device’s performance is measured by its speed of execution and how much it can hold in memory. Methods and tools can be used to perform a benchmark. We will cover this topic in Chapter 19. For a quick analysis, try the AIRBench application developed by Christian Cantrell, from Adobe, and read his blog at http://blogs.adobe.com/cantrell/archives/2010/10/using-airbench-to-test-air-across-android-phones.html.

AIRBench tests devices’ capabilities, but also runs performance analyses. I used it on three different devices. Table 5-2 shows the performance results I achieved in milliseconds (lowest numbers ...