Mobile app development is at its peak like never before. Mobile apps have become an integral part of a person’s life with the deep penetration of smartphones and tablet devices in the consumer ecosystem.

Developers developing mobile apps face issues developing apps for the huge mobile market and face difficulties targeting all major mobile OS platforms. Cross-Platform mobile app development is a solution which helps developers target major mobile app platforms using the same codebase. Though there are many options available out there, Adobe AIR is my preferred platform for developing such apps. No doubt it is the favorite of the mobile app development community as it won the award for Best  Mobile Application Development platform in Consumer section by Compass Intelligence at CES 2014.

There are many libraries available these days which extend the power of Adobe AIR platform and make it easy to develop mobile applications. Developing applications using Adobe AIR is a great development environment for Flash/AS3 developers who thought they were left stranded with the rise of HTML5. Developers can use their AS3 skills to develop consumer to enterprise level mobile apps.

Three of the key market players currently are:

1. Feathers UI

Feathers UI

Feathers UI is based on Starling framework and leverages the power of Stage 3D. This results in blazing fast performance and near native responsiveness and experience. The library consists of a lot of components and layouts that makes app development smooth and fast. Feathers is backed by Adobe, so you can expect continuos development on the platform and frequent release cycles. There already a large number of apps on iTunes App Store and Google Play Store that are built on this platform.

2. Mad Components

Mad Components

Mad Components is another AS3 based mobile app development platform. Mad Components make app development easy by use of XML based layout and coding. This is easy and involves short learning curve for the developers who are familiar with MXML based development using Flex. Similar to Feathers, Mad Components are also leverage power of Stage 3D. Tutorials and Examples on Mad Components can be found on the developer’s website.

3. Gingee

Gingee Games

Gingee is another upcoming platform that offers near-native performance for cross-platform app development. Unlike Feathers and Mad Components, Gigngee is being developed and maintained by a group of AS3 developers from Israel. The platform is gaining popularity fast and has an extensive documentation and examples for developers to learn from and start building apps. Also, the Gingee has a IDE version under development which proposes to reduce the development time further.

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