Adobe backtracks, reanimates Animate following user backlash

Adobe has backtracked on its decision to end sales of Animate, formerly known as Flash, after users protested about losing years of work. The design software giant had previously stated its intention to cease sales, and even access to the application, starting from March 1, 2026, though with continued use for existing customers for up to three years.

Mike Chambers, senior director, design marketing and community, said on Reddit: "Animate will continue to be available for both new and existing users. This is a change from what we communicated in the email yesterday."

Animate is a design tool for creating animations in either HTML/JavaScript or SWF (Shockwave Flash or Small Web Format) files. In the original announcement on February 2, enterprise customers with three-year agreements could continue to use Animate until the end of their term or at the latest March 1, 2029. Those with other agreements had a maximum of one year from this coming March. The company suggested using keyframe animation in Adobe After Effects, or animation effects in Adobe Express, as other options, though these only replicate a small part of Animate’s functionality.

That announcement was replaced today with a statement that "Adobe Animate is in maintenance mode for all customers... we will continue to support the application and provide ongoing security and bug fixes, but we are no longer adding new features."

Although Adobe discontinued the Flash Player in 2020, Animate still has users among designers and game developers, some of whom were dismayed by the initial announcement. "This completely devastates my entire workflow. 24 years of building up knowledge and expertise in a tool, paying out thousands on thousands of dollars for CDs, downloads, and subscriptions," said one on Bluesky. "They should open source this instead of ending it," said another.

The Animate discussion forums were full of protests yesterday, particularly as Adobe's first statement said not only that "access to your Animate files and project data will end on the date that support ends," but also that "application access" would end. "You aren't just throwing away software; you are discarding years of work from thousands of users. In my case, it feels like a part of my life is being invalidated," said one. "Animate was the only tool that could create a whole HTML5 banner campaign with multiple sizes in a few hours," said another.

The fact that Animate is a subscription product, with no perpetual license available, raised fears that users would no longer be able to open their projects. "Editing existing assets will become impossible... years of accumulated production data will be lost," said another user, adding their voice to a plea for either a perpetual license, or an open source release.

Animate evolved from Adobe Flash Professional, the design tool for the SWF multimedia format. The Flash Player was originally developed by FutureWave Software, acquired by Macromedia in 1997, which in turn was acquired by Adobe in 2005. Adobe said in its statement that Animate has existed for "over 25 years,” but this understates its history. FutureWave Animator was released in 1995, more than 30 years ago, and renamed as Macromedia Flash following its first acquisition.

There was a period in the early 2000s when Adobe seemed to have embedded Flash content into the web, making its player ubiquitous and establishing it as a runtime for applications as well as multimedia and games. The Flex SDK enabled building Flash-based applications, and Adobe AIR (Adobe Integrated Runtime) supported desktop and mobile applications using the technology.

That vision crashed when, in April 2010, then Apple CEO Steve Jobs posted his "Thoughts on Flash," explaining why Apple would not allow the Flash runtime on iPhones or iPads. He cited its proprietary technology, security, performance, impact on battery life, and poor touch support, and also dismissed the cross-platform development concept because "it is not Adobe’s goal to help developers write the best iPhone, iPod and iPad apps. It is their goal to help developers write cross-platform apps."

The impact was remarkable and it was soon obvious that Flash content would decline in favour of HTML5 technology, including CSS, SVG (scalable vector graphics), and Canvas.

Perhaps the surprising thing is that Adobe Animate has remained supported for so long – though it has been seemingly frozen in time for years. Reading through its documentation feels like touring a museum. The docs tell us that "Animate is integrated with CreateJS, which enables rich interactive content on open web technologies via HTML5." CreateJS was last updated eight years ago and appears stuck in a perpetual 2.0 beta state.

As for the Flex SDK, it was donated to the Apache Foundation, with its most recent release being back in November 2017.