Adobe AIR non-Administrator application installation/upgrade on Windows

Question

Is there any way to allow non-Administrator users to install, upgrade or uninstall an Adobe AIR application on Windows?

I've made an Adobe AIR application and packaged it as a .air package using the standard AIR mechanism for creating deployment packages. If a normal or Power user tries to install this AIR application, the Application Event Log shows an error saying administrative rights are required. And even if the user elevates during installation, administrative rights are still required for an upgrade using the automated AIR upgrade system (since an upgrade is essentially, behind the scenes, an uninstallation of a .msi package followed by an installation of another .msi package).

Is there any way around this?

What I've tried so far is:

• Using the Group Policy editor, setting Windows Installer to elevate during installations. Doesn't work, since AIR attempts a "for all users" installation.
• Specifying My Documents as the installation directory. Doesn't work, since AIR attempts a "for all users" installation.
• Giving the user Modify access to the Program Files folder where the application would usually reside. Doesn't work, since this isn't a file permissions issue.
• Making the user a Power User. Doesn't work, since AIR attempts a "for all users" installation.

I'm guessing that both installing and upgrading would work fine for a user if

• the AIR installer would attempt to make an "only for me" application installation instead of a "for all users" installation, and
• the user was a Power User, and possibly
• the application was installed to My Documents

I'm also guessing that this problem doesn't exist on OSX and Linux, since they have more intuitive concepts for per-user application installations.

Answer 1

This really needs to get fixed. TweetDeck in the enterprise? Choke me with a stick.

Answer 2

There does not appear to be any way to work around this according to the AIR 1.5 Administrator's Guide section on installing apps, which states:

On Mac OS, to install or update an AIR application, the user needs to have adequate system privileges to install to the application directory (and administrative privileges if the application needs to update the runtime). On Windows, a user needs to have administrative privileges.

So this limitation apparently applies to all supported OSs. The tone of the document throughout makes it quite clear that AIR is designed to assure system admins that users will be appropriately locked down. AIR is not the happy pathway from browser to desktop that I'd hoped.

Answer 3

Adobe doesn't seem to be practical. A standalone EXE (see Shu SA) would be a nice option, they just don't make our lives easy at all!!! But at least removing the admin rights would be nice. Come on, Active X or browser plugins don't require admin rights and they can do a lot of damage, they have crazy paranoid lawyers over there at Adobe and it makes the developers life sooo hard.

Answer 4

Just hit the wall for my application, due to this. Although the first deployment is not a problem, updating it especially when we have iterative builds is a bottleneck. Trying to work around it using any means. Would appreciate any help, if any of you people were able to do so already.

Thanks.

Answer 5

This description of using the Air SDK to run the application might work on windows, too: http://agoln.net/archives/106 Not sure how that interacts with auto-update...