Adobe AIR and Adobe Flash Player Team Blog

Today we are excited to announce our plan to move to a rapid release cycle for Flash Player releases starting with Flash Player 11.5.  This will allow us to deliver more frequent updates to our labs beta community.

Using the background update mechanism in Flash Player, beta releases will be installed seamlessly to our nearly 1.1 million beta users and we encourage you to subscribe if you have not already. Beta users will have access to new features earlier in the release cycle to use, test, and provide feedback. You may also subscribe to our Twitter channel @FlashPlayerBeta https://twitter.com/FlashPlayerBeta to stay on top of the current release schedule updates.

Due to this change we will consolidate our private and public beta programs into a single public beta program so we can bring the world’s best runtime to our beta users’ fingertips.

Considering how important the private prerelease program is as a channel of communication and discussion with our key partners and customers, we will continue to keep our private beta forum active for discussion only; however, no Flash Player beta updates will be posted on this forum.

We believe moving to the rapid approach is going to allow us to test Flash Player under different configurations and help us get early feedback from our customers; which ultimately will improve the user experience and drastically improve the Flash Player and AIR robustness and increase product stability.

The runtimes team is excited to continue to work with you and we are looking forward to your feedback and seeing the amazing experiences that will be delivered through Flash Player and AIR.

Several users have reported that their ELS (Encrypted Local Store) data created using AIR 3.3 or earlier is no longer available after updating to the AIR 3.4 runtime.  This occurred due to updates in the ELS architecture to improve security and improve stability with the removal of a third party library.  The result, however, is that the AIR 3.4 runtime can no longer access ELS data created with AIR 3.3 or earlier.

In the past we’ve given guidance on the usage of ELS in both blogs and our help documentation, suggesting that developers should not depend on ELS as permanent data storage because it “can be lost for a variety of reasons.” While our position on this hasn’t changed, we understand that some applications have come to depend on this data and we are actively working on a fix for the problem.

In the interim, Adobe is going to turn off automatic updates for the AIR 3.4 runtime so users will not be prompted to update to AIR 3.4 until we solve this issue.

Application publishers and developers, who are affected by this change in behavior of ELS, need to inform their users who have already installed AIR 3.4 to uninstall AIR 3.4 and install AIR3.3 using the instructions below:

Uninstall Adobe AIR 3.4 runtime from windows and install AIR 3.3:

1. In the Windows Start menu, select Settings > Control Panel.
2. Select “Programs and Features from control panel.
3. Select “Adobe AIR” to uninstall the runtime.
4. Click the “Uninstall” button.
5. Install AIR 3.3 runtime http://download.macromedia.com/air/win/download/3.3/AdobeAIRInstaller.exe

Uninstall Adobe AIR 3.4 runtime from Mac and install AIR 3.3

1. Browse to Applications : Utilities
2. Double click on “Adobe AIR Uninstaller”
3. Install AIR 3.3 runtime http://download.macromedia.com/air/mac/download/3.3/AdobeAIR.dmg

Please note that AIR 3.4 SDK will continue to be available for any developer wishing to take advantage of the new features contained in this version.  Developers should deploy these applications using our “captive runtime” capability to ensure the application functions as expected.

Going forward, we plan to re-implement our ELS changes in a future version of AIR to remove dependencies on 3^rd party libraries and improve the stability and security of AIR applications. Applications that continue to use ELS as persistent storage could be impacted. We will give advanced notice and make releases available on labs. Please report any other issues you may experience together with reproducible steps here.