Today I was asked not once but twice about whether or not installing an AIR application requires admin rights. If that’s not a sign that the topic needs some explanation, I don’t know what is.
Surprisingly, it’s not a yes or no question. The problem is that you have to know what you mean by admin rights, which may not be as easy to know as you’d think it should be.
A more satisfactory answer can be had by coming at the problem the other way around: Which rights are required to install an AIR application?
In general, there are two requirements: You must have rights to write to the install location on disk, and you must have rights to update any other system state that’s modified as part of the install—i.e., the registry on Windows.
The first item, install location, depends in part on the selected location. AIR defaults to a machine-wide location, which may or may not have restricted permissions. If you can’t install there, you can certainly try installing elsewhere, such as in your own user folder. You’re more likely to have rights to do that, although it’s still not guaranteed.
On Windows, however, the registry entries created as part of the application install are always written to the machine-wide portion of the registry. If you don’t have write access to c:\Program Files you probably don’t have the necessary write access to the registry, either, and so you’ll find that choose an alternate install location won’t be sufficient to make things work. And no, there’s no way to avoid writing these keys.
Mac OS is much friendlier in this regard: not only does it define ~/Applications as the per-user install location, but it requires nothing but write access to install an application.
So, does installing an AIR application require admin rights? Not always—but sometimes it does.
Comments
HiWhen an entire browser like Google chrome can be installedwithout Windows power user rights completely into the user space (disk/registry/Start Menu etc), AIR app install needs to be changed to support this as long as install folder chosen is in user space.– Start Menu in user space, not “All Users”– registry keys for an app should be in the user’s registry area, not HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE etc– No additions to Add/Remove programs. Instead put uninstall link in Start MenuIn most mature corporate IT environments, the desktop is completely locked down. So any app install can happen only in the user space.
But isn’t this discussion leaving out installation of AIR runtime? Even on Mac the AIR runtime/framework installer will ask for admin user password, right?
So the answer for both MAC and Win is yes, you’ll need admin rights.For example, default non-admin accounts don’t have writing rights to C:\Program Files on Windows.Your system admin or IT chief could however install AIR itself outside C:\Program Files, let say, C:\AIR and then the problem does not occur.
hello there,great blog this is !but i have problems invoking a *data* removal on uninstall.the data reached the clients computer through an installer skript.when uninstalling the air app ( via Settings.software) i would like to call the installers uninstall scriptthe data are large catalogue database and media, if included in the air package it becomes very big, and slow when installed…any information is appreciated![I think you're looking for this post about uninstallers. —Oliver]
Why does AIR need access to the Windows Registry anyway when there is nothing comparable on Mac?[Various Windows features, including file extension registration and Windows Installer, can't be used without using the Registry. --Oliver]
An Windows Installer can be setup to only edit the User (HKEY_CURRENT_USER) part of the Registry. I don’t know why AIR doesn’t work in the same way.[We felt we needed to support per-machine installs, and per-user installs were optional. (For enterprise admins, per-user installs are generally undesirable.) We didn't want to ask users which they wanted, so instead we went with always per-machine. —Oliver]I never seen a case where access to the ‘Program Files’ folder is limited. Normally admin rights only effect the registry.[Try Vista or Windows 7. —Oliver]According to Adobe AIR acts the same way on both Windows and Mac OSX.”On Mac OS, to install or update an AIR application, the user needs to have adequate system privileges to install to the application directory (and administrative privileges if the application needs to update the runtime). On Windows, a user needs to have administrative privileges.”[The same way, but not absolutely the same way. Rather, both approaches are standard system practices for their respective operating systems. —Oliver]
While I understand that admin rights are needed to install Air, why doesn’t the installer have better messaging? I get dozens of emails from users with Error code 0.There’s no information provided to the end-user as to why the install failed and nobody reads the FAQ. Can you add in some better handling for these situations so that people know to contact their own help desk and not us?Thanks,Zach
Can anyone confirm that installing AIR itself outside Program Files dir, really solves the problem of admin rights?Best,Alex[AIR cannot be installed outside of the Program Files directory. —Oliver]
We need help on silently network installing our Airhelp throughout 400 + linux clients machine… We cannot gave root access to the end user and i would love to know how can we push a new update at night (new version of our help.air file) silently without needed the end user interaction ?.? I mean how can our IT department push air updates silently
The short answer is: Use whatever tools you’d use to push a native Linux application to those 400+ clients. In general, we try to make sure that AIR applications can integrate with existing solutions, since we’re not in the business of supplying software deployment solutions per se.
Yes i have been inveted this admin right
Look this example from adobe forum 
http://forums.adobe.com/message/3626678#3626678