The future of Adobe XD

[Radaf]

Shall we switch to figma now or Adobe XD will continue in the market. 

I need answer from any Adobe employee cause I'm leading a team and I can't decide which direction to follow in terms of software 

Thank you 

[NMGD]

Switch to Figma as soon as possible. In terms of updates XD was rarely updated in recent year, with almost no introduction of new features while Figma constantly adds new features and it's rather active. Furthermore, Adobe is recently slowly removing access to Adobe XD as an individaul app etc. The sooner you do it, the more time you will have to adapt, considering that the change from XD to Figma is unavoidable. Figma as a more developed program provides much better and modern approach do UI/UX design, as it is stil being worked on by developers unlike XD in recent months.

[Joseph Labrecque]

Adobe employees will not say a peep about it until the deal with Figma is resolved one way or the other.

But yeah, like @NMGD says - switch to Figma.

[WolleSchmolle]

"Switch to Figma" sounds like pressing a button and hundreds of prototypes with hundreds more screens, interactions, definitions, illustrations would magically become usable in Figma.

That is also a question of cost. Who pays for the effort of preparing all this in Figma? How many months of work must be invested? I find the communication on this topic on the part of Adobe a scandal. This is about valuable assets for business that are being devalued.

[Chris W. Griffith]

Legally, neither side can say anything. My guess is that it would be a Figma lead effort, as it is their tool that is consuming the content, so the better the understanding of its engine would be the smarter path forward. I know there is a paid plug-in that does this, but I have not tested it. I suspect once the deal is either done or cancelled, an EOL roadmap will be shared. Adobe has had these issues with other products, so they have seen the technical and legal impacts of sunseting a tool (Flex, Flash, Muse, etc). 

[WolleSchmolle]

Burying Flash etc. was logical as the technology has changed outside the Adobe ecosystem. However, the prototyping software market is quite different. There are plenty of other players there. Companies need long-term planning security. The update policy alone in recent years for XD is a slap in the face for paying customers.

The existing plugins do not work to the extent that it is NOT necessary to touch every artboard again. Importing a mountain of SVGs into Figma is NOT a solution. We are still talking about a professional working tool, aren't we? This includes a precise library with components, colors, text formats, etc. You lose all that. 

As a customer, I expect a professional solution from Adobe.

[Spas K.]

It is logical that IF the acquisition goes through, and the transition from one tool to the other is official, there should be a proper migration tool / plugin that will require as little effort as possible from the user. While Adobe Xd and Figma share a lot of functionality, they also differ in some significant ways, especially with the improvements Figma has made over the last 2 years. I think the colors / text styles will be the easy part. What I assume will be more of a pain are the interactions and component states structure.

I don't think Xd will just disappear completely one day and Adobe will say "just deal with it". Even if there's no way to carry whole prototypes over in their entirety to Figma, I'd imagine Xd will still be available for some time to allow users to view and make changes to existing prototypes.

I personally also disapprove of the way this was all handled, silently pushing Xd off of the different Adobe pages and plans without any warning or notice. But as Chris said, there must be many legal details at play and we don't have the whole picture.

[WolleSchmolle]

 text styles will be the easy part

By @Spas K.

Text styles do not even work under different operating systems within Adobe XD: A standard font like Roboto that was created on macOS gets a shifted rendering on Windows.  🙂 This problem has been known for a long time and has NEVER been fixed by Adobe.

From this point of view, Figma would solve this problem since it is web based. 🙂

And even if we don't have the whole picture, we are paying for XD at this moment but not getting features that have been standard since years (e.g. component states can affect other components or states).