Adobe's Wild, Crazy and Incredibly Stupid 24h

Ever since Adobe switched to a subscription model, people have been pretty mad at the company. Every other day, someone is complaining about having to pay for subscriptions, even though it's been over a decade now. Over the years, Adobe has become the company everyone loves to hate, and in numerous instances the various outrages have been understandable. But earlier this week, the company went through an unmitigated fiasco, the scale of which really was quite something.

On Tuesday, I woke up to the news that Adobe announced that they were killing Animate, and people were furious. Not just the usual level of Adobe hate and frustration, but pure fury at the decision. 24 hours later, Adobe had reversed the decision. But why was there such anger over this? I suspect many people outside of certain industries aren't aware of what Adobe Animate is or its importance.

If you don't know what Adobe Animate is, you probably know it by its previous name: Adobe Flash. Yes, that Flash. However, since the infamous "Flash Player" went away, the authoring software became an industry standard for 2D animation, and is widely used for everything from webtoons, to many high-profile TV animation productions.

Its journey began in 1996 as "FutureSplash Animator", a tiny vector-based tool designed for the dial-up internet era. When Macromedia acquired it later that year and rebranded it as Flash, it sparked a digital revolution. For nearly two decades, Flash was the backbone of the web, powering everything from early viral sensations like "Homestar Runner" to the browser games that defined a generation. However, as the "Flash Player" grew notorious for security and performance issues, and was famously rejected by Apple's Steve Jobs, the software underwent a massive identity shift. In 2016, Adobe rebranded it as Adobe Animate to pivot away from the dying browser plugin and solidify its place as a tool for professional 2D television and film animation.

In the professional industry, Adobe Animate quickly became an industry standard, and it allowed small teams to produce high-volume TV content without the overhead of traditional hand-drawn cels. This "Flash-style" look is defined the style of 2000s and 2010s western animation. Iconic shows like "My Little Pony" and many, many others, proved that the software could handle high-quality TV production. Here in Ireland, I know of several studios who built their entire company on this technology and software.

Most western style 2D animation is now using this "flash-style" of animation, even if animation companies are using different software. It literally defined the look of modern animation outside of the Japanese and Asian "anime" style, which still uses traditional 2D techniques.

So to say that it came as a shock when Adobe unceremoniously ended the development of the software in the most dickish, Adobe way possible, is something of an understatement. The company informed users that the software would cease development in March, barely a month away, and it would no longer be available in a year's time. They announced a longer timeframe for enterprise customers, but that's not much condolence to independent artists who use the software. Not only that, but they also made a confusing statement that your files would no longer work past that time, as the software would seemingly stop working at that time.

Starting on March 1, 2026, Animate will no longer be available for purchase. Existing Animate users can continue to use Animate. Support for enterprise customers will continue for three years, through March 1, 2029. For all other customers, support will continue for one year, through March 1, 2027.

Access to your Animate files and project data will end on the date that support ends. To ensure a smooth transition, we encourage you to export your Animate FLA and XFL files to other formats such as SWF, SVG, and MP4 before this date.

While there are alternatives, switching software like this in a short space of time is a big ask for most studios. Not only do you have to buy the new software, and in many cases multiple seats, but you have to re-train animators on new tools. And then there are legacy projects and assets. Many studios would have built up huge libraries of assets over the years and would need considerable time transitioning these to new software, or recreating them from scratch. The callousness of this move from Adobe is quite something, given that there are literally thousands of jobs around the world that depend on Adobe Animate. They even teach this in art and animation colleges. I mean, there are probably students learning this software right now. Imagine completing a course in animation only to find out that half of it was a waste of time and money.

What's worse, they didn't even give a good reason for ending the software, only a vague legally vetted corporate platitude:

Animate has been a product that has existed for over 25 years and has served its purpose well for creating, nurturing, and developing the animation ecosystem. As technologies evolve, new platforms and paradigms emerge that better serve the needs of the users. Acknowledging this change, we are planning to discontinue supporting Animate.

Many speculated that it was related to AI, and the fact that this was the last software they hadn't actually bolted AI on to. Without an easy way to shoehorn AI into the software, the company just decided to kill it instead. Of course, this is just speculation, but it sounds about right.

I have seen people annoyed and angry at Adobe over the years, but never the sheer fury I witnessed on social media and forums as this news broke. In the past, I usually put some of the Adobe hate out there down to just the whims of the internet, but the rage in this case was totally understandable and well deserved. People were asking why they couldn't just keep the software going, even if they weren't planning future development.

After a day of anger all over social media and various forums like Reddit, Adobe backed down and announced that they weren't actually going to kill the software, but instead put it in "Maintenance Mode". This means that they won't add new features, but it will remain available and will receive bug fixes and maintenance. Of course, their stock price taking a hit from the fiasco probably had more to do with it than genuine concern for the community.

Here is the company's revised statement on the matter, via Mike Chambers:on X.

Current State of Adobe Animate

Adobe Animate is in maintenance mode. While we are no longer adding new features to Animate, we will continue to support it and provide ongoing security and bug fixes. More importantly, Animate will continue to be available for both new and existing users. This is a change from what we communicated in the email yesterday for the status of Adobe Animate, its time-frame, and availability.

To be clear, we are not discontinuing or removing access to Adobe Animate and it will continue to be available to both existing and new customers.

Commitments for long-term content/file Access

For Adobe Animate, our commitment is to work with the community to ensure users continue to have long term access to their content, regardless of the state of development of the application.

This has been a massive wake-up call for everyone involved, not just in the Animation industry, but the wider creative industry in general. It highlights the ongoing problem of Adobe's monopoly, and the feeling of many that they are trapped by the subscription system. In the days before subscriptions, had a company killed software like this, it would still keep working as long as you didn't update the computer to an operating system that no longer supported the software. With a subscription, though, you would be forced to keep paying, even for software that the company had killed. Even then, as was the original plan here, it could still be remotely killed. There were calls for Adobe to open source it, but that was never going to happen, unfortunately.

Even more than that, though, it highlights an utter disconnect between Adobe and its user base. How could any company be so blind as to not know that thousands of people depended on its software for their livelihoods? Or did they just not care? When they changed their minds, the general response seemed more like the company was taken by surprise than anything. The whole episode is truly a lesson in corporate incompetence.

There is certainly a bigger conversation to be had here about software subscriptions and software monopolies. To be fair to Adobe, they're hardly the first company to pull a stunt like this. Apple infamously killed Final Cut Pro 7 and its entire accompanying suite of Applications, including Shake and Colour. They also famously killed off Aperture, an Application that people loved and still talk about today, ten years later. But when Apple killed these, they weren't subscription-based, so you could keep using them. I still have Aperture running on my old Mac Pro. But what Adobe did was different because of the subscription model. If they killed it, it would have either stopped working, or you would have had to keep paying for a dead product, that they would then kill anyway. And all the money you had spent on it up to that point would have been for nothing.

In the case of Animate, there were fortunately alternatives, even if switching would have been difficult. However, with other software, options aren't as obvious. Take After Effects for example. As a motion graphics designer, I absolutely rely on this software for work. There are some other motion design packages out there, but absolutely none that can replace After Effects. If they tried the same thing here, we'd all be screwed. Over the years corporate consolidation and mergers has whittled away the competition in many fields and now there are many cases where there is limited competition in many fields. Something has to change, and hopefully this will have been a wake-up call.

Of course, all anyone cares about now is jumping on the AI bandwagon, so I doubt any lessons will be learned in the long run, except maybe the wrong ones.

On that happy note……