Adobe is announcing at Mobile World Congress that its digital publishing suite, which allows content publishers to craft magazine-like content for tablet computers, is now going to be available for Android in addition to iOS. Already, the Adobe software has been used to create over 100 publications that run on iOS devices, including big names like Wired, The New Yorker and Empire.
With the introduction of the Content Viewer for Android, the resulting publications will run as Adobe AIR applications on Android-based tablets.
Adobe says that its software will support Android 3.0, Honeycomb, and higher. It will offer the same options as found in the iOS suite, including the analytics feature which tracks the app’s usage and how end users move through the magazine’s pages. And it will include support for HTML5, navigational elements, visualizations, and overlays, just like the iOS version.
With the new version’s launch Adobe says that several leading publishers will soon bring their content to Android tablets. That list includes Condé Nast, National Geographic, Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia and Dennis Publishing. Dozens more magazines are coming to iOS, too, says Adobe, but it cannot announce additional names at this time, we’re told.
The new software will be available on February 14, though the Adobe Digital Publishing Prerelease Program. More info on that program is available at www.adobe.com/digitalpublishing.
It will be interesting to see how well digital magazines perform on the Android platform as compared with iOS. Will Android users pay for magazine content when they’re less wiling than iOS users to pay for apps? It looks like we will soon find out.
