Hi everyone, I’m a professional 2D animator and I’ve been using Adobe Animate since it was Flash, over 13 years now. I currently work on a MacBook with the M4 chip, and I’m using a Wacom Cintiq 16 (2025) connected via a single USB-C cable. I’m facing a serious issue that’s making it hard to work: the brush stroke in Animate has heavy delay, feels imprecise, and often appears jagged or broken. I recorded a video showing the problem: the line flickers, lags behind the pen, and Animate feels totally unresponsive while drawing. On top of that, if I enable “Scale to fit Wacom Cintiq 16” from the macOS display settings, the whole interface becomes huge, the pen calibration goes off, and it’s basically unusable. This only happens in Animate. In Photoshop and other drawing apps everything works perfectly. So it’s not a hardware failure, but likely something going wrong in how Animate handles the signal over USB-C. These are the tablets I’ve tested personally:
Intuos S Pro (USB and Bluetooth)
Wacom One
MobileStudio Pro
Cintiq 16 (2021, with 3-cable setup)
Cintiq 16 (2025, with single USB-C)
All show the same problem in Animate when used with USB-C (where applicable), but the older Cintiq 16 (2021) works just fine if I use the triple cable setup with USB, HDMI, and power. That setup fixes the issue completely in Animate, even on the same Mac.
I’ve already contacted Adobe support months ago, and after a very long screen-sharing session they couldn’t provide a solution. They told me they would follow up as soon as possible, but it’s been months and I haven’t received any further response. This lack of professionalism is very frustrating.
Moreover, since the problem is not limited to Wacom tablets but affects all tablets, I also received an email from XP-Pen explaining the issue, which I quote here:
"The behavior you describe is caused by a specific conflict between Adobe Animate and the way macOS handles tablet input through the system API. The fact that the circle cursor appears but the stroke only starts when the pen moves, and not as soon as the tip touches the tablet, indicates that the initial click (static tap) is not recognized correctly by Animate, while dragging is. This is a known problem with Animate on Mac, especially with digital pens, due to how the program interprets input signals in combination with security permissions and the use of emulated Windows Ink or similar."
I’ve also talked to Apple and Wacom support, reinstalled the drivers, reformatted the Mac, and tested on clean installs. Still no solution. I’m sharing this here hoping someone else has experienced the same problem or found a workaround. This is super frustrating because I chose a portable USB-C setup to simplify my workflow, not make it worse. Having to go back to bulky multi-cable setups just to make Animate behave seems like a huge step backward, especially when everything else works flawlessly.
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