Adobe AIR 100 million installs, Flash Player 10 already on 55.9% of all PCs
Did you know it took 38 years for radio to get 50 million users? 13 years for TV to get to that number and 4 years for the Internet to get to 50 million users? (according to Discovery Channel)
Adopting new technology seems to go faster and faster and the Flash Player census numbers prove this every quarter. The most recent numbers (published just now), show that Flash Player 10 was installed on more than 55 percent of computers worldwide in just the first two months of its release! That means it will surpass 80 percent by the second quarter of 2009, far outpacing the installation rate of past versions of the software.
The AIR runtime has also been doing very well. In less than one year after its initial release, there have been more than 100 million installations of Adobe AIR! On top of that, there have been over 1 million downloads of the AIR software development kit (SDK), the free open source Flex framework and Adobe Flex Builder in the last 12 months.
A big thank you goes out to all the developers out there who are building cool apps on top of the Flash Platform. Flash on!
Update: Also check Adrian Ludwig’s blog post on how we measure these installations.
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- David May - 100Mil Installations of AIR in 1 year, Flash Player 10 on 55% of computers worldwide in 2 months. http://is.gd/hDzq or ...
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Good enough for me! :)
**Changing publish settings – Find and replace Array -> Vector**
I’d like to see this contrasted with numbers for other frameworks, such as Gears, Silverlight.
@Tom – I’d like to see that too… Unfortunately, Adobe seems to be the only one open about these numbers.
Check out this site for a comparison – http://www.riastats.com/#
And I’m not sure if my maths is correct, but if there’s 100 million AIR installs, and 1 million downloads of the AIR SDK, does that mean there’s 100 users for every 1 AIR developer out there…? Not sure I like those numbers so much ;-)
@Jason – Not really. You only need to install the AIR runtime once but you can run multiple applications. Hope that clears it up a bit.
100 million installations. What is that in terms of percentages of the web audience? If the AIR installers are dispersed globally among billions of web users, then there is hardly a market for AIR apps yet (even at these numbers).
I don’t want to seem to critical, but why use different metrics for the Player and AIR?
@Charles – I checked this for you with Adrian Ludwig, the product marketing manager for AIR. Adrian replied: “It’s purely because of implementation details — Milward Brown was designed for testing browser plugins. AIR isn’t a browser plugin, so we need to make changes to the testing process to allow it to check AIR. Then, we need to run the survey a couple of times to make sure it’s producing consistent, reliable data. We are planning to switch to using the same statistics once we have reliable data, but the Milward Brown survey is only done quarterly, so this is a slow process.”