Hey, a few days ago, Adobe announced by email that they would discontinue Animate (their animation software, formerly called Flash). They’d stop distributing it to new customers almost right away, and cut off access for existing customers after a year. This announcement was very sudden, vague, and disrespectful.

No one took this news well and most people said that they would just pirate the software anyway. So a day later, after a lot of public backlash and Adobe’s stock price taking a big hit, an Adobe senior announced that they would not discontinue the software after all, but they would stop updating it. So basically you’re still required to pay for a subscription while getting no ongoing service. So that’s pretty shitty, but for a lot of professionals, at least that means they don’t have to change their workflow for a few more years.

None of this directly affects me – I use Flash 2015 – and the only thing I need updates for is AIR, which is the fancy Flashplayer for Desktop, Android, and iOS. AIR is maintained by HARMAN now (a Samsung company), and they intend to keep it supported indefinitely. BUT if this news scares off a lot of Animate users, the Flash ecosystem will get smaller, and it’ll probably make my life harder in the long term as the community gets smaller.

A lot of people are talking about making a free-and-open-source (FOSS) alternative to Animate, that can create .swf files. Users love what Animate can do, but it’s very outdated – it’s full of bugs, doesn’t make good use of modern hardware, and worst of all, you have to pay a subscription to a company that doesn’t care about you in the slightest. Adobe’s customer service is non-existent – if you want a bug fixed, or have a feature request… too bad.

Meanwhile, HARMAN has been very active in fixing issues with AIR/Flashplayer. Features that Adobe neglected for a decade were being fixed overnight when users asked (like stage quality options not being present in Desktop AIR). I was thrilled at the thought of Adobe abandoning Animate – maybe they would hand it over to another company, or if not, then there would be a gap in the market for new tools to be developed that can create .swf files. Adobe announcing that they’re continuing to sell Animate is the most boring outcome. It just maintains the status quo that no one was particularly happy about, except now trust is even lower than before, and there’s never going to be any new features.

What people want from Adobe is for them to open-source the software, but that’s never going to happen. They don’t even want to hand it over to another company, because it’s too integrated into the Creative Cloud ecosystem.

Another thing they could do would be to offer a reasonably-priced option to buy the software outright, and no longer make it a subscription. I’d go for that, and I’m sure many other professionals would too.

Anyway, I hope those efforts to make a FOSS alternative gain some traction. There’s a lot of successful animation studios and game devs that would be interested in funding it, just to get away from Adobe.