It probably hasna4a4t been a fun year at Adobe, as the company endured a very public feud with Apple over the absence of its Flash technology on the iPhone and iPad, followed by speculation about its future as an independent company. Nevertheless, Adobe has soldiered on with its strategy to get its technology onto (mostly non-Apple) devices, and now it says those efforts are paying off.
As it prepares for the Mobile World Congress coming up in Barcelona this week, the company has shared several data points showing the adoption of Flash (which is used to play a lot of the video and games available through your Web browser) and AIR (which developers can use to create downloadable apps that run across multiple devices). For example, Adobe says that more than 84 million smartphones supported AIR at the end of last year &8212' which is particularly impressive when you consider that the company only started talking about its plans for AIR a year ago, and didna4a4t officially launch AIR for Android until October.
During the first two months of AIRa4a4s official availability, developers used the tools to create more than 1,500 apps, said senior vice president David Wadhwani. He told me that Adobe doesna4a4t have any reliable way to track similar numbers on the iPhone. (Apple had initially suggested that it might block AIR apps from running on the iPhone, but that hasna4a4t happened.) Anecdotally, Wadhwani suggested that a4Athe developer interest, as you can imagine, is a function of marketshare.a4
He added that the real advantage of AIR is that a developer could build an Android app, then make it available on iPhones and other smartphones with only a4Amarginala4 effort.
Here are some of the other numbers and predictions that Adobe shared:
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Companies: Adobe
People: David Wadhwani
Companies: Adobe
People: David Wadhwani
Anthony is a senior editor at VentureBeat, as well as its reporter on media, advertising, and social networks. Before joining the site in 2008, Anthony worked at the Hollister Free Lance, where he won awards from the California Newspaper Publishers Association for breaking news coverage and writing. He attended Stanford University and now lives in San Francisco. Reach him at anthony@venturebeat.com. (All story pitches should also be sent to tips@venturebeat.com) You can also follow Anthony on Twitter.
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