Adobe AIR Is Flying: 100 Million Installations Accounted For

Adobe has announced that they’ve recorded 100 million successful installations of Adobe AIR, the company’s cross-platform runtime environment for RIAs, at the same time boasting that the newest version of Adobe Flash Player (10) was installed on over half of computers worldwide in just the first two months of its release.

The company made the announcement at the Adobe MAX Japan event, notably less than one year after the official release of Adobe AIR.

Adobe says the 100 million mark for Adobe AIR installs is a minimum for the total install base of the AIR runtime (read: they think it’s actually more than that) since they only count the ones that are deemed 100% successful (i.e. they can be confirmed by code running after the installation). As for developers building Web applications using the Adobe Flash Platform, the company claims that in the last 12 months there have been over 1 million downloads of the AIR software development kit (SDK), open source Flex framework and Adobe Flex Builder.

Based on the results of a Millward Brown survey, Adobe also boasts that Flash Player 10 has been installed on 55% of computers worldwide, and they expect to surpass 80% penetration by next quarter. In total, no less than 99% of internet-enabled desktops are said to have at least some version of Flash Player installed. You can see the percentages broken down by version here but keep in mind that the numbers come from Adobe.

As we’ve noted before, Flash Player is still struggling to make the jump to mobile phones.

For the sake of comparison, the last time Microsoft shared numbers on its Flash Player competitor Silverlight was when the company released Silverlight 2 in October 2008. They didn’t publish actual install numbers, but said the adoption rate was nearing 50 percent in some countries and 30 percent in the U.S.

Going back to Adobe AIR, in a blog post the company’s Group Manager, Flash Platform Product Marketing Adrian Ludwig says that the vast majority of installations are driven by applications rather than people going to Adobe.com to install the runtime environment.

Ludwig cites TweetDeck, Twhirl, AOL Top 100 Videos and eBay Desktop among the most popular applications (full list). I personally use AIR powered desktop applications Twhirl, Yammer, Google Analytics Reporting Suite, Finetune Desktop and Snackr the most.

What about you?