After procrastinating for two years, I finally caved in and acquired an iPad. What makes the iPad such a sexy item is the apps. Not only games, but a cosmos of exciting and useful tools to kill time when I'm on the train to and from work.
Naturally, I'm eager to try and deploy games I have made in AM to my new toy. Sadly, AM makes no apparent provision for the iPad, even though it does apparently make provision for the iPhone.
And what about Android?
The attraction of AM is that it has a relatively gentle learning curve compared to other game engines. It is limited in its capacity, so I've been looking around at other engines, many of which have the ability to output to iPad. But every other engine I've looked at demands that I learn at least one new computer language, and the engines themselves have a pretty steep learning curve. We're talking C++, Python, Torquescript and other OO languages. Its a daunting prospect.
A few people have pointed to third party tools which they say can convert AM into a format readable by iPad, but these seem to require you to have an Apple desktop or laptop, which I don't want to invest in, I'd rather buy a new Windows 8 desktop.
When the Surface Pro is released at the end of the year it sounds like it will be a fantastic compromise between the iPad and Windows 8, and should run AM. But for the time being, unless you're into high performance shooters or RPGs, the iPad is the future of gaming. It's long overdue for AM to have the ability to make iPad games without using plugins or third party tools.
I've noticed that the AM forums are a lot less active than they were a few years back. Perhaps the reason is that AM has not continued to develop along with developments in gaming and changes in the device market. Food for thought.