When will Adobe UXP for Illustrator be released?

[HEEHANG27692316p8v0]

I already knew CEP, but I just learned something new called UXP.
However, I can find documentation for Photoshop,

but I can't find documentation for illustration.
When will it be released?

[Mylenium · Accepted solution]

When it's ready. That's all you are ever going to find out. It will one day simply appear, but whether that's with the next major release or still farther away only people on the Betas know and they are not allowed to say anything about it.

Mylenium

[Erin F.]

First, the Illustrator team still hasn't given us a date for opening up UXP to the public. Second:

 It will one day simply appear...

That's not quite accurate... If you want to find out early, there are a few different things you can do:

• First, you can join the Illustrator prerelease here. (Requires signing an NDA.)
• You can sign up for the Creative Cloud Developer Newsletter. (It's monthly, more or less.)
• You can follow the "Creative Cloud" feed of the Adobe Tech Blog.

Similar to UXP's release in Photoshop, InDesign, and XD, the engineering team will be looking for feedback in the prerelease. My team (the Creative Cloud Developer Experience team) will partner with the Illustrator team for the release as well.

[NEXU]

I'm more curious on when will CEP reaches end-of-life in Illustrator? Will UXP fully replace CEP or they'll exist next to each other?

This concerns thousands of exiting CEP extensions, and what's going to happen to them.

[Erin F.]

I'm more curious on when will CEP reaches end-of-life in Illustrator? Will UXP fully replace CEP or they'll exist next to each other?

This concerns thousands of exiting CEP extensions, and what's going to happen to them.

I understand your concern!

UXP and CEP should live side-by-side for quite some time, however, using Photoshop as a cautionary tale, this decision is up to Illustrator's product team. (Basically, Photoshop decided they would stop supporting CEP on M1 native versions, so current CEP users must launch PS in Intel mode.)

Illustrator has not yet released a timeline for UXP adoption or CEP deprecation, so there's no danger anytime soon.

[Bjorn Syse]

Hi!

Any public news on this progress/roadmap now one year later?

Regards

- Björn

[jolg42]

It looks like there was nothing about UXP for Illustrator for the Adobe Max release. It's taking a lot longer than expected is, I think, the feeling we have as a community.

[hhas01]

The one small but relevant news I’ve seen is a recent mention that Illustrator can now/will soon support multi-threading:

https://blog.adobe.com/en/publish/2024/10/14/even-more-speed-precision-power-get-started-latest-illu...

Threading doesn’t really matter to Illustrator on desktop, where all interactions (not counting us automators) are a single human user manipulating one document at a time via its GUI, but it will be important to the headless Ai engine Adobe is putting into their Adobe Cloud.

The big problem is that Illustrator’ guts are 40 years old(!), hard-welded to a 1980s one user = one [G]UI = one active document model, so there’s a lot of ancient nasty internal plumbing that needs to be reworked or replaced to bring it into this century. (TBH they should’ve started this modernization 20 years ago but, eh, monopolies…) This isn’t to say UXP couldn’t be built atop the old core, but it’d be a hella nasty lash-up and Ai is already cranky and unstable as it is. So I don’t blame them for doing the whole job in a sensible order.

Once that blocker is out of the way, I’d expect UXP to progress quickly atop the new architecture. UXP (for its faults) powering Ai+PS+ID engines in the Adobe Cloud will be a Killer Product, and now Adobe’s woken up by fresh competition it’s pulling all the stops.

Alas, I’ve just checked out the Ai 29 SDK (what ExtendScript’s built on) and it’s the exact same gnarly 40yo API, so no new movements there. Here’s hoping for MAX ’25…