Build Mobile Apps for Android Devices, BlackBerry PlayBook, iPhone and iPad Today!

Posted on June 19, 2011 by Puneet Goel

Since our April news announcing Adobe Flash Builder 4.5 and Flex 4.5, we began with support for building mobile apps across multi-device platforms, first with Android. Today we’re happy to announce updates to Flash Builder and the Flex framework that now offer support for iPhone, iPad and BlackBerry PlayBook. As a result, developers can quickly build and distribute apps through the Android Market, BlackBerry App World and Apple App Store using one tool chain, programming language and code base—a first for developers!

Our own Flash Platform evangelist Serge Jespers shows us what “one tool, one framework, one codebase” means, and demonstrates an app developed for different devices using Flash Builder and Flex:

Developers from different industries such as government, entertainment and gaming have been using Flash Builder 4.5 and Flex 4.5 to help them reduce development time and the cost of delivery to build some pretty amazing apps across the major platforms:

- Politifact.com: A project of the St. Petersburg Times and a 2009 Pulitzer Prize winner, the PolitiFact.com team extended its website content into a mobile app available across leading app stores. The PolitiFact.com app helps readers find truth in politics by investigating statements by members of Congress, the President, lobbyists and other Washington D.C. personalities.

- Netflix Queue Manager: Using Adobe AIR 2.5, Flash Builder 4.5.1 and the Flex framework, RIA design and development group UnitedMindset created the Netflix Queue Manager, which allows users to connect with and manage their Netflix queue across devices and features intuitive search capabilities. With success in the Android Market—over 340,000 downloads since October 2010—the app is coming soon to BlackBerry AppWorld and the Apple App Store.

- Mr. Mixit and Pyramix: Web design and development agency HD Interactive first released Pyramix, a word game combining the strategy of Cryptoquote and the simplicity of Boggle, and Mr. Mixit, a spin-based matching game where you mix record labels against the clock, to Apple’s App Store. The new updates allowed HD Interactive to use the same code to deliver the apps to Android Market and BlackBerry AppWorld in record time.

- Muni Tracker: Are you from the San Francisco Bay Area or maybe planning to visit? This app helps you track locations, arrival times and bookmark your favorite stops and lines for Muni (San Francisco Municipal Railway), San Francisco’s public transit system. The developer was able to quickly and easily port this original Android app to iOS.

- Conqu is an easy to use yet powerful task management tool designed to help conquer an e-mail inbox and get things done. Using Flash Builder 4.5, the developer, AsFusion, was able deploy the app on multiple platforms with minimal effort. They were also able to reduce the time to develop the app since there was no need to debug different code for each individual platform.

Android and iOS users can also check out these apps from the Adobe Mobile Showcase at m.adobeshowcase.com. As always, we’d love to see and hear what you’re creating with our technology – whether it’s mobile, web or desktop apps. In fact, we encourage you to upload videos about what you’re building to the Flash Builder 4.5 Widget to share and even vote on projects from around the community!

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61 thoughts on “Build Mobile Apps for Android Devices, BlackBerry PlayBook, iPhone and iPad Today!”

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Jan Mueller on June 20, 2011 at 1:08 am said:

Amazing if it really works that easy without breaking and having the same capabilities as the native environments! Tip my hat, adobe : )

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z on June 20, 2011 at 7:03 am said:

It works on android 2.2 with arm v6?

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- Craig Corica on June 21, 2011 at 1:32 pm said:
  
  @z- Yes, devices running Android 2.2+ with ARM 6 are supported.
  
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ylluminate on June 20, 2011 at 7:07 am said:

Great work. Glad to see this after our previous controversies and all of the hard work going around in prerelease.

What’s the status now of the Cocoa limited kits such as StoreKit? Support for these is the real “pot of gold” at the end of the rainbow for me. This would be absolutely out of this world if these can be tied in now, otherwise, it’s nice but we just can’t use it yet.

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AK on June 20, 2011 at 7:11 am said:

Is it possible to build something in pure HTML5?

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- Craig Corica on June 21, 2011 at 1:34 pm said:
  
  @AK- You can use Adobe Dreamweaver to create HTML applications. See http://www.adobe.com/sea/products/dreamweaver.html and http://www.adobe.com/devnet/dreamweaver/articles/dw_html5_pt1.html.
  
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christ0pher on June 20, 2011 at 8:15 am said:

I can’t view the video on my iPad.

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- Craig Corica on June 20, 2011 at 9:52 am said:
  
  @christ0pher — Sorry you cannot view the video, but Adobe Flash Player is not supported on the iPad at this time. Flash Player is required to watch Adobe TV in your web browser. Please refer to the Flash Player System Requirements for more information: http://www.adobe.com/products/flashplayer/productinfo/systemreqs/.
  
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Ghulam Hassan on June 20, 2011 at 8:27 am said:

Can this help to play Flash Base Videos on Apple iPAD 2 using safari Browser; Please replay…

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- Craig Corica on June 21, 2011 at 1:35 pm said:
  
  @Ghulam Hassan – Unfortunately, Apple’s Safari browser on iPad does not support Adobe Flash Player at this time. Therefore, it is not possible to view any Flash content with the Safari browser on the iPad.
  
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Leo on June 20, 2011 at 8:54 am said:

REALLY COOL~~~~~~~!!!!!!

But does it has any limitation compare with their own development kit? For example, communicate with device(control the camera, local storage I/O, local db engine… etc)

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Craig McMunster on June 20, 2011 at 9:52 am said:

The last thing users want is a pile of bad, non-native, lousy UX apps.

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Eric on June 20, 2011 at 10:21 am said:

So if we already have CS5.5, will this be pushed to us an update?

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- Craig Corica on June 21, 2011 at 1:28 pm said:
  
  @Eric — Yes, it will be pushed as a CS5.5 update. You can also go into Flash Buidler >> ‘Help’ >> ‘Search for Flash Builder Updates’ to get it right away.
  
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Pier on June 20, 2011 at 11:07 am said:

How does it compares in performance vs native objective c for ios?

Can you use 3d opengl libraries like the one used in ios games?

Can you use external as3 libraries like Papervision3d?

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- Craig Corica on June 21, 2011 at 1:29 pm said:
  
  @Pier – Comparative performance varies depending upon the use case. No, you cannot use native libraries at this time.
  
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Alex on June 20, 2011 at 11:21 am said:

Does this finally support the iPhone 4′s Retina display? Can you target different resolutions and such? This is an instant purchase if so!

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- Craig Corica on June 21, 2011 at 1:30 pm said:
  
  @Alex – Yes, different DPIs and resolutions are supported.
  
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Steve D on June 20, 2011 at 11:21 am said:

Download the free Flex 4.5.1 SDK here:
http://www.adobe.com/go/flex_sdk/

Good luck finding the update link for Flash Builder.

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yogev on June 20, 2011 at 12:16 pm said:

Congratulations, really good news.
i searched all over for some Adobe AIR iOS examples for a long time, but with very little luck.

I’m happy to see here some examples finally!
I paid to try – Mr. Mixit and Pyramix , the animation are really slow, and it’s simply not impressing in gameplay, graphics and performance.

Adobe – try harder and post some quality examples, you know you can choose them, right?

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Vinicius Jarina on June 20, 2011 at 3:03 pm said:

What about SDK restrictions of Apple?

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- Craig Corica on June 20, 2011 at 3:16 pm said:
  
  @Vinicius — These resources should help you develop Flex and Flash Builder apps for iOS devices:
  
  http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flex/articles/mobile-development-flex-flashbuilder.html
  http://www.adobe.com/devnet/air/articles/packaging-air-apps-ios.html
  
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Rahul Aggarwal on June 22, 2011 at 9:23 pm said:

Convenient! Really innovative with the flash builder. The apps for multi-platform devices is the need of the of hour and Abode, you guys have done it ! Keep up the good work and thanks for sharing this update!

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ade on June 23, 2011 at 7:32 am said:

what happens if/when Apple decide to change the rules again?

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Sac on June 23, 2011 at 9:15 pm said:

I wanted to know exactly as what ADE asked about, is there a possibility that after we develop for all platforms, one fine day Apple says they will not accept the app because it is not using native code ?

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gingerbread android on June 27, 2011 at 9:46 pm said:

I’m a fan of Netflix and therefore I’m always looking for a good app to manage my Netflix queue.

I love to playing the trailer movie that are comin soon.
But Netflix doesn’t offer their own native app so we need used 3rd party app.

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mmind on June 28, 2011 at 1:21 am said:

It’s really nice, i did a mini app to test the scrolling performances, it worked, then i did the last update for ipad (ios5 beta2) and we cannot install a flash builder app anymore, the ipad does not fully install the app.
Xcode can publish on the beta 2, so are you aware of this and are we sure app builded with flash builder 4.5 will work on ios 5 ? thank’s

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- Craig Corica on June 29, 2011 at 12:58 pm said:
  
  @mmind – Apps built with Flash Builder 4.5 should be able to be deployed to iOS 5. We are not aware of any blocking issues at this point and plan to release official support for iOS 5 later this year.
  
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Marcus on June 29, 2011 at 6:09 pm said:

From what I’ve seen so far, this is just another “cross-platform” solution in the “they don’t get it” category. Sorry, cross-platform on mobile is not just about being able to deploy one app with the same UI design across multiple devices. It just doesn’t work that way. For example, iOS and Android have drastically different user interaction paradigms – e.g. where buttons/controls are located, what widgets are available, navigation, menu bars, the list goes on. An app designed for iOS should not look like an app designed for Android. I have yet to see “cross-platform” tools address this. All they do is either try to force their own UI paradigm or they employ a paradigm that is very iOS-ish. From the apps I’ve seen developed using Adobe platform tools, it’s the same; the Android and the iOS apps look identical and/or have UI designs that are not consistent with the platform. Also, we should stop kidding ourselves that “cross-platform” is really all that big of a deal. iOS and Android are currently the only two platforms that really matter. Blackberry is on the decline (unless thy embrace Android and better hardware design) and Windows is a non-player in mobile (too late to the game, sorry, b-bye).

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para kazanma yolları on July 2, 2011 at 5:50 am said:

Thank’s for post,I learn’t something about “Build Mobile Apps for Android Devices, BlackBerry PlayBook, iPhone and iPad Today!”

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para kazanmanın yolları on July 2, 2011 at 5:50 am said:

what happens if/when Apple decide to change the rules again?

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Eugenijus on July 8, 2011 at 8:19 am said:

Really innovative with the flash builder.

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Rajesh Panchal on August 5, 2011 at 3:21 am said:

cant find the link to http://developer.apple.com/ios/unauthorized.action

i wants ipad certificates…. gimme perfect link. so i can….

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Treasure Hunt App on August 11, 2011 at 2:19 am said:

Your existing ecommerce platform whether vendor supplied or developed in-house will play a huge role in your mobile app development. Many of the the services your mobile app will need are already provided by your ecommerce platform. Ratings and Reviews, shopping carts, cross sells, order history, shipping options, product catalog etc should all be integrated between your web and mobile channel. Your development teams will need to expose these existing services in a way in which your mobile app can consume them.

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Bios Pro on August 17, 2011 at 12:57 pm said:

where can i see more sample and pictures of pre-built flash designs

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Hulk Slash on August 18, 2011 at 4:46 am said:

very interesting indeed, how much is the program going for and is there a 30 days trial before buying it ?

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- Craig Corica on September 12, 2011 at 10:10 am said:
  
  @Hulk- You can download a free 60-day trial version of Flash Builder to check it out here: https://www.adobe.com/cfusion/tdrc/index.cfm?product=flash_builder. The product costs US$249 for Flash Builder 4.5 Standard and US$699 for Flash Builder 4.5 Premium. More info here: http://www.adobe.com/products/flash-builder.html.
  
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Mark NY on August 18, 2011 at 8:19 pm said:

it’s all good, i experimented the app to test the little skills i had, and it worked, I will keep on testing it and I will post more updates!

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Mark NY on August 18, 2011 at 8:21 pm said:

Just what I was looking for, Adobe need to advertise more this little Application…very nice.

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Ali on August 23, 2011 at 11:49 pm said:

Hi ,

Thanks for your good work ,

I would like to ask you about target platforms ,
I am not sure why my Flash Builder dose not have iOS and Blackbarry options as Target platforms , There is only one option which is google android , Do I need to install anything before I run Flash Builder , If so , Could you please let me know how I can install iOS and Blackbary platform in my Flash builder .

P.S : I am using Flash Builder 4.5 in windows 7 64bit .

Thanks
Ali

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- Craig Corica on September 12, 2011 at 10:18 am said:
  
  @Ali- We announced an update to Flash Builder (v4.5.1) in June that includes support for iOS: http://bit.ly/iDGEfc. With this update, developers now have a single platform for building highly expressive mobile applications that can be distributed via the Android Market, Apple App Store and BlackBerry App World. Have you upgraded your Flash Builder software? If not, you can do so starting at US$49: http://www.adobe.com/products/flash-builder.html. If you’re having technical issues, please post a comment on the Adobe Flash Builder Forum: http://forums.adobe.com/community/flex.
  
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Andrius on September 9, 2011 at 5:26 am said:

Great Application…very nice. My iPhone will rock Hope Apple will not change the rulles…

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