We've seen a few AIR-for-Android demos making the rounds, but it was good to hear from the horse's mouth, so to speak, that AIR for Android should be live at some point during Q4 2010. We first heard back in February that Adobe AIR would be coming to Android as part of the 2.5 release.
AIR apps will be Market-ready and will not require any special approval process.
AIR for Android will have roughly the same hardware and software requirements as Flash Player 10.1. The Android devices in question will have to be running Android 2.2 (a.k.a. Froyo) as well as an ARMv7 processor and OpenGL ES 2.0.
One of the cool apps we've seen demoed is this Android-compatible version of Apple's FaceTime. This app was built over the course of three days to test the features of AIR 2.5 for Android.
In addition to P2P video apps, we're sure that AIR apps will be great for casual games, multimedia consumption, shopping and many other types of mobile applications.
Ever since we saw Adobe and Apple get testy over Flash on mobile devices and Flash-built mobile apps, we've noticed a much cozier relationship between Google and Adobe, especially on issues of hardware and software. Google confirmed Froyo would support Flash back in April, right around the time Apple banned devs from using Flash to build iPhone apps. From that point forward, Adobe has encouraged devs to focus on the Android platform instead.
From what we saw today, Flash 10.1 and AIR 2.5 will be bringing great things to the newest breed of media-friendly and game-ready Android superphones.