The recent drama over Apple’s rejection of Adobe technology caused quite a stir online, generating a large number of blog posts, massive amounts of commentary, a fair share of whining, and much hating. With Adobe finally resigned to the fact that they were effectively shut out of the iPhone (at least for now), it seems like the Android community is getting much more attention suddenly, as previously reported by Android Police and others.

As a result, Adobe seems to be pushing Flash and Air more aggressively and announced on their Air blog that developers have already started porting Adobe AIR applications to Android very successfully:

"Over the last few days, developers in the Adobe AIR for Android private beta started creating AIR applications for the Android OS. Using existing code from Flash applications or their AIR applications created for the iPhone, developers were able to create applications in just a few short hours and for one developer in just 10 minutes!"

With a large amount of high quality AIR apps already available (Tweetdeck comes to mind), the amount of available Android apps is about to increase significantly.

In conclusion, here is some actual feedback posted by Flash developers:

"It literally took me 10 minutes to compile for Android, and get the game on my new Nexus One phone"

-Alan Queen

"Performance-wise, AIR for Android is fast. With barely any work on my part, I got my three existing mobile games running in AIR for Android."

-Josh Tynjala

"Well with no code changes, about 2 hours to have the graphics tweaked (thanks to @pneal), I was able to port Happy Peg over to Android."

-Matthew Keefe

"My Nexus One arrived yesterday (FedEx Saturday delivery FTW) about 4pm, and I had Fruit Smash Organic ported to the device and running beautifully by 7pm! That includes downloading and installing the SDKs, walking through a Hello World tutorial, charging the device for a little while, and making some minor code edits."

-Jobe Makar

What can we say? Flash is really important to consumers nowadays, and it will take a long time before HTML 5 can make a big enough dent in Flash's market share (this is assuming Flash will stand still, which they won't). With most Android devices promising full support for Flash 10.1 sometime after the first half of 2010, is this a checkmate for Apple? Probably not a mate, but a check for sure.

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