Adobe said it will be updating Adobe AIR for Android Gingerbread Tuesday, which is another indication that the next version of the mobile software will be out really soon – it could even be introduced later today by Google CEO Eric Schmidt.
If you don’t know, Adobe AIR can be used to create full-fledged applications that can go into the Android Market. These AIR apps can include access to the camera, various sensors and these can even run in the background. Adobe is trying to leverage its developer support on the desktop and make it easier for these content creators to port apps over.
The Adobe AIR 2.5.1 update will be optimized for Android Gingerbread and Adobe said:
If you are interested in helping us drive rapid adoption and proliferation of this latest release, we recommend that you update your application to require AIR 2.5.1 to help drive users back to Android Market for your update and the update release of Adobe AIR.
In cases where a user receives the Gingerbread OS update before updating to the AIR 2.5.1 runtime, they will receive a native dialog on load stating that the application has quit unexpectedly and your application will fail to load. We’d like your assistance in preventing end users from this type of experience on their device.
So, this AIR update will be released tomorrow, which means we may see Android Gingerbread soon … like within the next 12 hours. Schmidt will be speaking at the Web 2.0 conference later today and that could be the perfect place to unveil the next version of the little, green robot.
What can we expect from Android Gingerbread? Well, we know that it should be 2.3 and not 3.0, so we should adjust our expectations accordingly. I’d imagine we’ll get some user interface improvements, a few slight tweaks here and there but I’m not expecting the platform to be tablet-friendly until Honeycomb.
[Via Adobe AIR blog]