Setting up your development environment

Mobile platforms have additional setup requirements beyond the normal AIR, Flex, and Flash development environment setup. (For more information about setting up the basic AIR development environment, see Adobe Flash Platform tools for AIR development.)

Android setup

Note: If you use Flash Professional CS5, you can download the AIR for Android extension from Adobe Labs. The extension allows you to create, package, and install AIR for Android apps. With other tools, you can develop a mobile app to the point of packaging, but you must use ADT to create the final application package.

To develop AIR for Android apps, you must download and install the Android SDK. The Android SDK and instructions for installing it are available from the Android Developer web site: http://developer.android.com/sdk/installing.html. You will need the SDK Tools component and, if you plan to use an Android emulator, you must install at least one Android platform component (API level 8+). On Windows, you will need the USB Driver component if the built-in Windows drivers do not properly recognize the phone when you connect it to your computer USB port.

If you plan to run the AIR development utilities from the command line, rather than an IDE, you can set the AIR_ANDROID_SDK_HOME environment variable to reference the Android SDK folder. If you do not set this environment variable, you must specify the path to the Android SDK in the -platformsdk argument on the ADT command line.

iOS setup

For iOS setup and development information, see Building Adobe AIR Applications with the Packager for iPhone.