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

No special setup is normally required for Android in AIR 2.6+. The Android ADB tool is included in the AIR SDK (in the lib/android/bin folder). The AIR SDK uses the ADB tool to install, uninstall, and run application packages on the device. You can also use ADB to view system logs. To create and run an Android emulator you must download the separate Android SDK.

If your application adds elements to the <manifestAdditions> element in the application descriptor that the current version of AIR does not recognize as valid, then you must install a more recent version of the Android SDK. Set the AIR_ANDROID_SDK_HOME environment variable or the -platformsdk command line parameter to the file path of the SDK. The AIR packaging tool, ADT, uses this SDK to validate the entries in the <manifestAdditions> element.

In AIR 2.5, you must download a separate copy of the Android SDK from Google. 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

To install and test an iOS application on a device and to distribute that application, you must join the Apple iOS Developer program (which is a fee-based service). Once you join the iOS Developer program you can access the iOS Provisioning Portal where you can obtain the following items and files from Apple that are required to install an application on a device for testing and for subsequent distribution. These items and files include:

  • Development and distribution certificates

  • App IDs

  • Development and distribution provisioning files

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