> Just today I saw a report of Adobe discontinuing a tool in use by professionals because it is done and they don’t know what else to add.
Yeah, I'm sure the reason stated by the customer support is the real one, and not the lack of profitability from that tool among a shift of focus towards AI[0] as reported everywhere.
https://techcrunch.com/2026/02/02/adobe-animate-is-shutting-...
> for over a decade, no bugs or maintenance necessary
I'll believe it when I see it. Keeping something running for a long time is a lot easier task than building something that can be run in an ever changing world.
Given that it's that old I'd wager that it isn't runnable on/compileable for ARM64 without some kind of maintenance. And if it's written in an interpretable language there is a good chance that the underling interpreter/runtime are EOL by now.
> A lot of the time, failing to to finish software indicates a badly defined scope.
And a lot of the time finished software becomes unused because it sticks to scopes that don't match up with reality/user needs anymore.
> I'm sure the reason stated by the customer support is the real one
Oh, but it's so much more beautiful than that! You're really underselling it! It's not "the reason stated by the customer support", it's:
The reason snarkily paraphrased by a Mastodon post Which quotes a Twitter post Which quotes a Bluesky post Which tells a story about a conversation with an Adobe customer service rep.
Surely that tongue-in-cheek Mastodon post increases the information that we have about this incident by exactly Zero.
Yeah, I have a relatively simple script with webUI for organising photos and videos I take on my NAS.
Over the years I’ve had to upgrade the ffmpeg dependency, which resulted in breaking changes a couple times and maintenance.
I’ve also had to spend nearly a whole day fixing the webUI when iOS’s wonderful liquid glass came out.
How did liquid glass break your Web UI?
Liquid Glass changed dimensions and viewport measurements for fixed position elements, amongst a whole host of positioning related bugs:
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/79753701/ios-26-safari-w...
Many of the bugs were fixed in 26.1, but still, I had to fix it to use it.
I was surprised that not much of the entire web was broken, but a cursory search of commits showed that the WebKit/Apple team took the approach of coding in site specific hacks for popular sites (eg instagram, google search!) for iOS 26.
Maybe I’m not looking in the right places, but I rarely see fixed position elements in modern web layouts— I imagine that’s why you didn’t see more disruption.
They may not be used in layouts, but they can be present in cases like keyboard open (if you wanted to attach some controls above the software keyboard for example); or just ever growing compatibility hacks.
> not the lack of profitability
What “lack of profitability”? They just reported a record quarter. Adobe shoves full Creative Cloud subscriptions down everyone’s throats; buying one tool, especially when it’s not one of the flagships, is uncommon. What exactly are they losing by just letting Animate be?
> And if it's written in an interpretable language
I have never ever ever had to change shell, Ruby, or JavaScript code because “the underling interpreter/runtime are EOL”. Never. That code keeps happily running, doing its work, with whatever version of the interpreter I have available in whatever box.
> And a lot of the time finished software becomes unused because it sticks to scopes that don't match up with reality/user needs anymore.
So what? That’s perfectly fine. Do you drink milk out of a baby bottle? Do you ride a bike with training wheels? It’s perfectly fine to build a tool for a purpose and a time and place and let it exist there for the people who care for it. That’s also true of video games (which, lest we forget, are software). In a world where people are constantly complaining about software updates moving shit around, removing features, and adding crap they don’t want, plenty of people appreciate that the things they like continue to work as they always have.
> What exactly are they losing by just letting Animate be?
Maintenance cost (which you claim doesn't exist) of the engineers that they are planning to staff on other project they are assuming will be more profitable. Of course that's just a bet and not a sure thing.
> I have never ever ever had to change shell, Ruby, or JavaScript code because “the underling interpreter/runtime are EOL”.
I think we are living in different realities. Almost every (open source) project that I encounter that's 10+ years old isn't runnable without changes.
> Do you drink milk out of a baby bottle? Do you ride a bike with training wheels?
Do you still drive a Ford Model T?
its really funny people are so adamant on this while software written for linux 1 still work on linux 6. it is a developers choice to burden themselves with every changing foundations... maybe not the wisest choices in the long run to go for easy things in the short run..
> Yeah, I'm sure the reason stated by the customer support is the real one, and not the lack of profitability from that tool among a shift of focus towards AI[0] as reported everywhere.
Yeah, although "finished" software is antithetical to this always have new features to push onto your customers subscription model, so it's not entirely unrelated.
Having said that I still find it strange. I can imagine it might not be able to ride on the AI bubble, and perhaps animators are especially vocal about not wanting AI in their tools. But even so, why would that make Adobe Animate unprofitable? They do have a subscription model, and customers, so people are paying for this product.
Compared to other digital art, the data for vector animation takes relatively little space to store. It also requires much less resources to render than other forms of video, and rasterized video output should compress really well compared to alternatives, especially with modern codecs that are not only optimized for regular film. So surely it shouldn't be that expensive to maintain for them compared to all their other projects.
> But even so, why would that make Adobe Animate unprofitable?
Sorry, I wasn't precise with my wording. What I meant to say was "less profitable than the perceived AI opportunities they could do with the same engineers".
Ah, ok. Even then switching Animate into "maintenance mode" should be doable on a shoestring budget methinks but whatever, the more Adobe hurts itself the better tbh.