Animate 2025?

[Willi Lopes]

Will there be no update for Animate this year?

[JoãoCésar]

Hi.

It should be today because Adobe usually updates the Creative Cloud apps in the first day of Adobe MAX.

Other softwares already have their updates available:

[Willi Lopes]

Exactly, I was expecting some update. Maybe this is a sign that Adobe is going to abandon Animate for good.

[JoãoCésar · Accepted solution]

Unfortunately, I'm not very optimistic... The Animate team stopped updating the prerelease forums months ago. And now the lack of a new major version... So...

[n. tilcheff]

Greetings, Willi and João!

The silence seems to be rather deafening.

(Only posting to bump the thread and keep it alive...)

[Willi Lopes]

Hello my friend Nick,

It seems like the only version of 2025 we’ll have is yours. Let's keep this thread alive!

[DigitalDesignDude]

Here's my post to help keep this thread alive.

It's times like this I wish Adobe Animate was open to development contributions from its community. But I do recognize Animate is a closed-source project and will not likely change from that. I am glad though that scripts and custom extensions can make up for some of Animate's missing features, however, there's only so much those solutions can do before limitations are hit, and they can't fix existing bugs within Animate.

I continue to hope that Adobe will recognize Animate's potential and give it more priority, or at the very least, provide more allowance for community contributions to help Animate stay competitive with other animation apps.

[HarrowwInk]

I rarely ever post on here but here's my two cents on the situation.

As I see it, I fear Adobe have just shelved Animate for good before we know it. Seeing how benign and half baked each new feature for the most recent versions are, and seeing how the prerelease forums have been left dormant for so long, not to mention the lack of any June updates for 2023 or 2024, I fear that Animate has essentially been discontinued, and we will most likely never see any version newer than 2024.

[Willi Lopes]

You brought up a good point about the situation. Is no one from Adobe going to comment? Doesn't anyone know someone on the inside who can give us some insight?

[JoãoCésar]

I have already requested an update on this situation of complete silence about Animate on internal official channels and in the Prerelease Forums many times, but I have not received a single response for several months.

It was only recently that someone from Adobe showed any willingness to find out what was going on, but this person, despite their good will, only managed to get confirmation that Animate would not be at MAX, which we already knew/expected.

I'm still waiting for a new update. In case I get it, I'll make sure to share it here ASAP.

[LN Creatividad]

Nosotros estamos esperando una actualización con muchas ganas, llevamos usando Animate desde hace muchos años (Antes Flash), si no se actualiza, será muy malo para nosotros. We are looking forward to an update, we have been using Animate for many years (previously Flash), if it is not updated, it will be very bad for us.

[Joseph Labrecque]

Muy malo para nosotros, indeed.

[Cristiano Alves]

I'm really sad about this lack of updates for Animate. It's been my software of choice for creating animations since it was Macromedia Flash. I hope Adobe is not planning to abandon it, once there are a lot of creators that still use Animate.

[JessicaCorrea]

I'm also sad about this situation. Now that I've improved my animation skills with this software, I don't want to have to learn another one. Animate CC also works with programming, something I find hard to find in other software. Despite its limitations, Animate is currently my work tool, where I started in the world of 2D animation.

Please Adobe, give us answers!

[_keyframer]

You may want to really look at Rive

[JessicaCorrea]

Currently I'm only in the animation part, like cartoons. Does Rive take care of that part too or is it just interactive animation?

[_keyframer]

there's so much I could say - but I will only add, I'm not only disapointed to see Animate whither away in the dark cold corner of Adobe, but moreso the way the team quietly abandoned us in the process. They shut the lights off and closed the door while we're still in the room and won't talk to us anymore. 

I've moved on but what a master class on how to not to treat your most devoted users.

[rayek.elfin]

Unfortunately this behaviour is exactly as expected based on past behaviour. Fireworks, Dreamweaver, Adobe XD, Muse, ... All started with a deafening silence. And then after a (long) pause in communication a message that active development had been stopped, and the software would be in 'support' only mode.

Next will be a call from users begging Adobe to open source Animate and/or sell it to another party.

Which will be ignored by Adobe. More silence.

[n. tilcheff]

Well...

The team which abandoned its most loyal users and promoters inherited a healthy application at its peak - Flash Pro CS6 - and through incompetence, carelessness and lack of vision, slowly ran it into the ground.

This same team ignored nearly all good advice and feedback, coming from people who really cared and knew what they were talking about.

In 2019 with the ridiculous implementation of the so-called Advanced Layers it became quite obvious that the people in charge were amateurs, had no idea what they were doing and Animate had begun circling in a death spiral. 

Still, I did hope that higher management kept an eye on the product and feedback and they will all be replaced by a new competent team, which could take over and resuscitate Flash.

What happened after that must be a symptom of higher-level rot at Adobe, which I see no point in commenting, because the only Adobe product I'm interested in is Flash.

Things could have been very different with very little.

[EloyAnimate]

Nick, reading comments like yours and the community in general, I feel a sense of relief knowing that I'm not the only one distressed by the current situation of Adobe Animate. I don't even usually go on forums and communities, but Adobe's lack of involvement in this software is so great that I ended up here. Sometimes I look at other software like Moho, Spine2d and other new ones that are emerging and the only thought that comes to mind is: Adobe has much more money than all these guys put together, WHY isn't Animate bigger than all of them? Because it belongs to the richest company and seems like the poorest software. I've loved this software since the beginning and I wouldn't like to have to learn another one from scratch, but the current situation is really sad.

[n. tilcheff]

Thanks @EloyAnimate !

You're definitely not alone feeling saddened and distressed about this absurd situation.

There must be thousands of people whose livelihood depends on Flash/Animate who are not so plugged into the Flash animation community and are still totally unaware of the current crisis.

I will not go into speculation why things happened the way they did, and for now I will not say more than what I posted above. One day on our website I might write a memoir of what I witnessed first hand in the three decisive years: 2018-2020.

Good luck with your projects!

[JoãoCésar]

Hi, everyone.

A small update.

I have asked the team and I was told to wait for an answer on this situation.

So let's wait for now.

[JessicaCorrea]

Nice!
I don't know how to contact them directly, so I tried the "Adobe Video" Facebook chat. I explained about Adobe's abandonment and gave them the link to this thread. Someone read it and replied that they would pass it on to the product team.
It may not come to anything, but who knows...

[JoãoCésar]

Hey, Jessica.

You did great!

The more users who speak up, the better. I think it increases the chances of them responding and responding faster, and even reconsidering if they've already decided on the worst.

[_keyframer]

I'm surprised you even got a response JC! All my inquiries a year ago went un-answered. I used direct lines of communication that were active for a very long time. Hard to remain optimistic but either way, if Animate sticks around fine. I'll likely need to use it for some client work. But overall, my loyalty has waned and I have found alternative software that is seeing a surge in users and overall excitement.