Is Adobe Overhyping AIR's Success?
Adobe AIR, an excellent cross-platform run time for web-connected desktop applications, has been downloaded 100 million times in under one year of availability, according to a post on the AIR team blog today. We like AIR, a lot, but the hype smells funny to us.
Venture Beat says Adobe is winning the platform race and TechCrunch says that AIR is Flying. There are reasons to believe, however, that AIR is not being used widely and news coverage of the announcement so far has failed to look at those details.
No Transparency
Adobe AIR is a platform that many developers have built applications on top of. Big brands like the New York Times and eBay have made splashy announcements about their AIR apps. Are people using them, though?
In September Adobe put out a frustratingly vague press release announcing, in fact, that AIR apps had been downloaded 25 million times. At least we think that's what the release said, after Adobe PR wrote to tell us that our original report that AIR had been downloaded 25 million times was incorrect. The whole thing seemed like a snow job and in fact Adobe's Rich Internet App evangelist Ryan Stewart deleted his own blog post about that announcement.
Bundled Software
The fact is, the vast majority of AIR downloads probably come from the software riding along in a bundle with the much more popular Adobe PDF Reader and the CS4 design software. Those are programs that millions of people feel like they have to have. There are a lot of AIR apps that are nice to have, but we can't think of many that are a "must have" for the general population.
Desktop Twitter App TweetDeck is a must-have for serious Twitter users, but when Adobe lists TweetDeck and Twhirl as among the most popular apps downloaded by these owners of 100 million AIR installs - then we really suspect this isn't a serious number. All of Twitterdom has maybe 6 million people and only a tiny fraction of them use these AIR power tools.
Adobe does say however that "the majority of AIR runtime installations occur at the time the first AIR application is installed by a user -- usually through the use of an "install badge" using AIR's seamless install feature."
We suspect though that people are downloading AIR because it tags along with other software they actually want and then once they've got it, they aren't using it. Now Adobe is hyping it like the the company won the Superbowl (that's how many people in the US will watch the game, by they way, 100 million) and it just doesn't seem likely to be true. That's our theory.
We await an official response, but we asked these questions publicly on the Adobe blog post about the announcement and so far only supportive comments are being approved to appear there. Update: Our comment is now posted, so we'll see what kind of response we get.
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From the Adobe blog: One thing the number of successful installs does not tell us is where are all the installs are coming from. Some are coming from people who come to Adobe.com to download the runtime, but the vast majority are being driven by great, popular applications.
Adobe's own AIR marketplace lists a total of 374 apps. If a "vast majority" of installs are due to "popular applications" (which almost certainly listed at the markeplace), and if we are to assume a typical long tail of popularity over all apps, this means the top apps have been installed tens of millions of times. Doesn't sound right to me.
Hi Marshall,
Interesting article.
Unfortunately, we don't have any way to track usage of applications -- any insight you or your readers can provide on that would be great.
We mentioned twitter specifically because those companies have made their download numbers public and usage numbers are also public : http://funkatron.com/twitter-source-stats/
Cheers,
Adrian
aludwig@adobe.com
What's with the hating? 100 million download count is great. As a developer, I would be looking at the trust in the platform by consumers, what it's capable of, the installed base, and the ease of use/user experience.
The details on usage for any random application would be interesting, but not something that I would need before I would deploy an app on it.
I've made apps in AIR and after trying to use them in a commercial setting I can say that AIR will fail.
The hurdles of AIR
Run without installing
This is the biggest problem for me, why cant you just run the app without installing it. Trying to convince a client that the solution is better but immediately when you say "install" they don't want it.
AIR runtime and installation
It baffles me that there isn't a way to make a self extracting executable with the AIR runtime that also installs the application. The boss isn't going to pay me to make an executable and having to apply for a license to distribute the air runtime was the final nail in the coffin.
Adrian - thanks for your reply.
Useful - re the "hating" there's a natural tension between companies that want to make their adoption seem really great and writers who want to know how much enthusiasm the market has truly shown for software. I hope that AIR apps find wild success but I question the claims that imply it's already happened. Sorry if it made me grumpier than seemed appropriate.
Massaging download/install/usage numbers to look exceptional is nothing new. It is a very common practice, for instance, to conflate downloads with installs, or to suggest that every install is an active user. Flash may have pioneered the effort back in the Macromedia days but everyone with a dl exe or plugin pretty much pushes the stats to suggest that theirs has the greatest market penetration and usage.
You'd think in the modern era of always-connected, service-based apps that someone would engineer a way to directly report how often their plugin/runtime is actually launched and for how long... but perhaps the data returned would upset product marketing too much. ;P
As a developer that uses even if those numbers are not quite right it does not matter as it just shows that people will install air apps.
don't forget the bbc uses it for iplayer now.
my only real moan is the lack of socket programming options for it, adobe wants it to be an ria platform but don't give us real sockets.
Also while I am moaning, they add udp socket connections sort off and then make you use their own network tools which is rubbish.
you will not see any decent p2p applications on the air platform until adobe get with the program.
other than that I love it :P
Installed, used ebay client once - went back to the ebay website for searches. So that's one install out there that isn't used.
Useful - I guess the thing is that to do anything useful - as in anything you can't already do in a browser through Flash anyway, it HAS to go through the install process.
Otherwise, IT departments will block it, because it bypasses all the control they've put in place to prevent people inadvertently downloading and executing applications / malware.
(Although I do think that a lot of the reasons these problems exist is precisely because they have tried to solve the deployment problem by pushing software out onto the network).
The thing I see about AIR apps that instantly draws web developers in is the allure of a simplistic development model, touting "use the existing web skill set you have - HTML, CSS and JavaScript". However, to really build offline desktop apps of any worth, you need to know Flex, which is a pretty steep learning curve.
Also, the IDE integration between other Adobe products makes it possible, but certainly not painless, to write AIR apps in text editors.
Hey Marshall, the deletion of my blog post wasn't intentional. I moved blog hosting services and I lost some posts using the Wordpress export/import process. I didn't realize that one got the axe, but I'll try to put it back.
=Ryan
ryan@adobe.com
I forgot to mention that there is more detail on how we calculate the install number on the AIR blog: http://blogs.adobe.com/air
We want this number to be as transparent as possible, so please let me know if there are questions.
And to provide some context about the "hype", we made this announcement at our developer conference in Japan because it's the most frequent question we get from developers. They want to know whether their application will be quickly accessible to a large set of users who have already installed the runtime.
Marshall,
100% agree and the fact that CS4 or Adobe Acrobat was never mentioned is misleading.
You should also ask them how many AIR downloads are through bundles?. They should have a good handle on that number.
How many are also repetitive installs?
I've installed a number of Twitter-related AIR applications. None of them stick for two main reasons:
1) Installation is often borked - for example, all AIR apps insist on installing on the root of my USB drive, which is a mystery to me. And when the applications try to update themselves, it usually ends in dismal failure.
2) These are supposed to be little widgety lightweight network apps, but they use an obscene amount of memory. I always thought Eclipse and Visual Studio were hogs - until I tried a few AIR apps. This tells me the platform is needlessly bloated, and that's not good for a relatively young platform.
The idea is good and the execution is OK. They just have some show-stopper kinks that need working out.
@chris arkenberg
In this modern era, directly reporting information back to a company is referred to as "phoning home" and is often looked down upon. Of course, this may only hold true for commercial apps which can be pirated.
Some applications now have a question at installation, asking the user whether they would like to send anonymous usage data. This gets around the negative connotation with phoning home, but leaves marketers with only a lower limit to the actual usage. Perhaps this is better than none?
I think AIR has promise. I use some apps that are good. Some are CPU hogs. Def don't run as well as a native apps, but hopefully Adobe will work on the performance, not just the eye candy.
Overhyping? I guess yes, this is the case. What is that for common users? They just get interface that looks and works differently from their native OS, and for lazy developers this is the next tool for developing something that runs anyhow everywhere. Let alone it doesn't possess specific functionality of any particular OS. Just another plaything, that's it.
Well i believe the numbers doesn't matter as the overall acceptance of AIR has remained pretty good. Besides few problems AIR is a great platform to develop on. As far as the problems are concerned i believe Adobe is already on the way to rectify them in next release.
@useful "This is the biggest problem for me, why cant you just run the app without installing it."
What? You have to install an app before you can run it? Nobody will EVER do that. People aren't used to installing apps before running them. I mean, Word, Photoshop, WoW, Firefox - these are all applications that can be run without being installed, and they're successful.
Oh wait, these and most other applications require that you install them before you can run them.
"Massaging download/install/usage numbers to look exceptional is nothing new...."
Hi Chris, I read your comment a few times, are you suggesting these stats are flawed in some way? If so, how?
Kevin, "phone home" is sensitive... CS3 got a bad rap last Xmas because its Help system checked for new content... people seem okay with Firefox's daily check, but I'm glad Flash Player lets people control this... application usage is usually a touchier topic than application startup. Complex!
jd/adobe
oh yeah. Adobe is hyping this a lot. if i recall correctly there is not a single AIR App with a million users yet. unless Adobe Media Player has reached that goal. but i doubt it.
"Adobe AIR is a platform..."
Last time I checked AIR is Runtime...
Adobe sure is hyping AIR... What about it? There's nothing wrong with promoting your own product, right?
I don't happen to really REALLY use AIR and quite honestly, I don't feel like AIR is about to revolutionize desktop applications or the internet, but it does enable a web developer to do a lot of stuff we weren't able to do a few years back with what could probably be called 'the smallest effort ever', on top of what we did, using the tools we used.
That's just plain awesome.
A fella can't be all places at all times on the Net, but I sure haven't seen AIR in play save for *maybe* two places.. And I'm thinking it's more like only one.. That could just be the type of surfing I do, but stil.. :)
And, goodness, don't get me started on accessibility.. AIR itself was not accessible to my Windows 2000, *my CHOICE* for a computer at this point in time because of my income level.. Simply said it would not download because of my setup..
If a company doesn't want to have the monkey that is the worry of exposure-based embarrassment related to hyped numbers on its back, it simply needs to find a way to increase its usability factor.. If the product is good, is *usable*, larger numbers won't be able to help but come..
e.g......
That one AIR-using company I had tried to patronize back when had a feature I had really wanted, nay, desperately needed that no one else was providing at that time.. Now it's been four, five, maybe six months in Internet time since that instance so who knows, ya kn
John Dowdell wrote: "Hi Chris, I read your comment a few times, are you suggesting these stats are flawed in some way? If so, how?"
Well, I know that download numbers are sometimes conflated with install & usage. This may be laziness, assuming a download is equal to an install, or it may be deliberate misdirection to use download numbers (a known value from the server) to make it look like the technology is actively adopted and in wide use (a much fuzzier metric).
I'm not saying Adobe has done this - I don't know the details of their methodology for collecting & reporting the data - but its something people should be aware of when looking at such reports.
Re: Phone Home... yes, this has negative connotations but I suspect these are slowly evaporating in the always-on, always-connected modern world. For the most part, people are getting increasingly comfortable sharing their data with corps & the rest of the world.
100 milion installs it good but i don't think any apps really warant an install. they range from the useless to the bizarre wedding widget anyone? http://www.princesssparkle.co.uk
Hi, thought this may be of interest: Adobe AIR - what's with the high CPU load, http://tinyurl.com/aircpu