Can I develop for Android and iPhone with Adobe AIR if I don't care about the App Store?

Question

As far as I understand, applications made with Adobe AIR have been blocked from the App Store. If I wanted to utilize AIR anyway to create a cross-platform app (for iPhone and Android) would it be possible to distribute the apps outside of the App Store?

I have very little experience with the iPhone, but I know that in Android you can turn on the ability to install applications from other sources than the Android Market. This would not be a problem in this case, where the target group is small and controlled. Is this also possible with the iPhone?

Update

It seems my basic idea that iPhone AIR apps are possible doesn't work. This is a quote from Adobe's page about the iPhone packager:

At this time, we have ceased further development of the Packager for iPhone, and we plan to keep this completed work in CS5 to demonstrate the capabilities of the Flash Platform to support multiple platforms and devices.

Answer 1

There's no official support for third party markets. There are other stores but your users would have to jailbreak their handsets to access them. I've see estimates of around a million jailbroken phones, which limits your audience to about 1% of the total user base.

There are two official options other than the App Store: Ad Hoc and Enterprise. The former allows you to send copies to a maximum of 100 devices, and there are limits on how often you can add/remove devices from the list. It's really designed for beta testing.

Enterprise is designed for distributing in house apps to your employees, but you need over 500 people to be eligible.

In short, there is no way to send a URL or file to your users and have them install the app that way.

Answer 2

I don't think AIR applications run on iPhones at all... The AIR support on Android is still in private beta.