It will no longer offer support for the Adobe AIR runtime

Apr 24, 2014 03:35 GMT  ·  By

Canadian mobile phone maker BlackBerry is gearing up for the release of a new flavor of its mobile operating system, namely BlackBerry OS 10.3.1, but it seems that this won’t happen until later this year.

In fact, the latest info on the matter suggests that the platform update will become commercially available only at the end of this year, and not sooner than that, as N4BB notes.

Last week, BlackBerry announced its BlackBerry 10.3 developer roadmap, and unveiled that the 10.3 SDK that should arrive in May would no longer include Adobe AIR as a runtime in the upcoming OS.

The handset vendor made it clear that AIR support would be discontinued as soon as the BlackBerry 10.3 update arrived on devices, though it did not provide specific info on when that might happen.

However, the Adobe AIR End of Support notice FAQ unveils that the support for the AIR runtime will be removed toward the end of the year.

“We expect BlackBerry 10 OS version 10.3.1 to be commercially available toward the end of the year. BlackBerry 10 OS version 10.3.1 and above will not support the Adobe AIR runtime,” BlackBerry notes in the aforementioned FAQ.

This also means that developers who are currently using AIR should port their applications to Android or to BlackBerry’s WebWorks runtime, in order to ensure that they remain compatible with the platform.