Adobe AIR Reaches 200 Million Installs

Adobe has confirmed that its Rich Internet Application (RIA) platform Adobe AIR has reached 200 million installs confirming earlier reports by company officials. That is still well below the company's most popular product, Flash Player, which is claimed to be installed in 99% of the world's computers as of March 2009.

“During the Flash Camp Keynote in San Francisco a couple of weeks ago, Adobe CTO Kevin Lynch mentioned that AIR reached over 200 million installs. We've gotten some questions from developers about that number, so this is a quick post to confirm that as of June 1, 2009, AIR has been installed on over 200 million desktop computers worldwide,” said Adrian Ludwig, announcing the milestone on an Adobe blog.

Equally impressive is the growth rate as Adobe AIR has gone from 100 million at the beginning of 2009, just 10 months after the platform was introduced, to 200 million today, and this rate is expected to increase. Of course, the numbers don't necessarily mean that users have downloaded the software themselves or that they even know that it is installed, as the runtime environment for Adobe AIR has been bundled with a number of Adobe applications, with Acrobat Reader, the free PDF viewer the company offers, among them.

Adobe AIR is a RIA platform that allows developers to build cross-platform desktop applications using Adobe's Flash technology. One of the most popular applications built for the platform remains the company's own Acrobat.com, which provides a simple office suite as well as sharing and collaboration tools. The company is also claiming that AIR is proving to be popular with many big companies, naming BBC, with its iPlayer Downloader, as well as Time and the New York Times. Adobe also claims that the platform is getting more enterprise adoption though the numbers are still small in that sector.