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On Tuesday, after suffering a day of blowback, Adobe rescinds its kill order and announces the program is going into maintenance mode. The original email sent to registered and paying users apparently said "We're contacting you to let you know that Adobe will be discontinuing Adobe Animate on March 1, 2026. As an existing Animate user, you may continue to use Animate, but please note that technical support will no longer be available after March 1, 2027."
Animate was, more or less, the successor to the Flash development package which was killed ages ago in favor of HTML 5. And apparently much more used than Adobe thought.
Reactions to the Monday announcement: ... were swift and angry on social media. "Adobe discontinuing Animate out of the blue is nuts," writes artist and animator Julia Glassman on BlueSky. "Many television productions, games, and all sorts of animated media still rely (on) Animate/Flash pipelines. They're all supposed to just...pivot to entirely new software and pipelines?!"
Animator Christopher Linoleum brought up how many big-name shows utilize the program: "Adobe Animate remains an industry standard for TV animation. Star Trek: Lower Decks was made in Animate. Haunted Hotel was made in Animate. My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic was made in Animate. And because you can't buy a permanent license anymore, it'll just be gone."
YIKES! So a pretty important program to the entertainment industry! The original kill date was announced as March 1, 2027. But a bigger problem was that apparently either cloud storage is required or a major component of the program, and that would be shut down at the same time, so users would lose all their assets and data! Remember, folks - all the cloud means is that it's somebody else's server. The "Cloud" isn't anything mystical, it's just someone's server.
After getting bombarded with hate and flamed to cinders, Adobe "... now says that Animate will now be in maintenance mode going forward and that it has “no plans to discontinue or remove access” to the app. Animate will still receive “ongoing security and bug fixes” and will still be available for “both new and existing users,” but it won’t get new features."
There's one unmentioned problem. With no updates and it being in maintenance mode, it will eventually be bypassed by operating system changes. It may take 5-10 years or more, but it will happen. And it may become glitchy before it dies. Smart production houses are going to start looking for better alternatives now and start planning migrations and new work flows soon. Sadly, apparently Reddit threads say there's no real alternative for professional production. I'm not familiar with that field so I have no idea.
The article that I saw yesterday announcing the original kill order:
https://www.gamespot.com/articles/adobe-is-killing-a-popular-animation-and-game-development-program/1100-6537851/
Adobe backing away:
https://www.theverge.com/tech/873621/adobe-animate-maintenance-mode-reverse-course
Slashdot mocking the back-off:
https://it.slashdot.org/story/26/02/04/0730222/adobe-actually-wont-discontinue-animate
EDIT: I should have checked Ars Technica. Their article on all this was quite informative, telling me that Animate is actually the original Flash, but renamed! I was unaware of this, I've never been involved in creating things with Flash.
Some comments in the Ars article had a very cogent observation: there's no AI assistant in Animate, and it's probably based on a very old code base, so it would be hard to retrofit it. Which means Adobe can't realistically increase its current price of $23/month. If they can't make more money from the product, kill it. Occam's Razor that's a pretty good guess.
And yes, people are already thinking Adobe cannot be trusted and are rethinking their production pipelines.
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/02/adobe-reverses-decision-to-discontinue-animate-after-a-lot-of-confusion-and-angst/
Animate was, more or less, the successor to the Flash development package which was killed ages ago in favor of HTML 5. And apparently much more used than Adobe thought.
Reactions to the Monday announcement: ... were swift and angry on social media. "Adobe discontinuing Animate out of the blue is nuts," writes artist and animator Julia Glassman on BlueSky. "Many television productions, games, and all sorts of animated media still rely (on) Animate/Flash pipelines. They're all supposed to just...pivot to entirely new software and pipelines?!"
Animator Christopher Linoleum brought up how many big-name shows utilize the program: "Adobe Animate remains an industry standard for TV animation. Star Trek: Lower Decks was made in Animate. Haunted Hotel was made in Animate. My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic was made in Animate. And because you can't buy a permanent license anymore, it'll just be gone."
YIKES! So a pretty important program to the entertainment industry! The original kill date was announced as March 1, 2027. But a bigger problem was that apparently either cloud storage is required or a major component of the program, and that would be shut down at the same time, so users would lose all their assets and data! Remember, folks - all the cloud means is that it's somebody else's server. The "Cloud" isn't anything mystical, it's just someone's server.
After getting bombarded with hate and flamed to cinders, Adobe "... now says that Animate will now be in maintenance mode going forward and that it has “no plans to discontinue or remove access” to the app. Animate will still receive “ongoing security and bug fixes” and will still be available for “both new and existing users,” but it won’t get new features."
There's one unmentioned problem. With no updates and it being in maintenance mode, it will eventually be bypassed by operating system changes. It may take 5-10 years or more, but it will happen. And it may become glitchy before it dies. Smart production houses are going to start looking for better alternatives now and start planning migrations and new work flows soon. Sadly, apparently Reddit threads say there's no real alternative for professional production. I'm not familiar with that field so I have no idea.
The article that I saw yesterday announcing the original kill order:
https://www.gamespot.com/articles/adobe-is-killing-a-popular-animation-and-game-development-program/1100-6537851/
Adobe backing away:
https://www.theverge.com/tech/873621/adobe-animate-maintenance-mode-reverse-course
Slashdot mocking the back-off:
https://it.slashdot.org/story/26/02/04/0730222/adobe-actually-wont-discontinue-animate
EDIT: I should have checked Ars Technica. Their article on all this was quite informative, telling me that Animate is actually the original Flash, but renamed! I was unaware of this, I've never been involved in creating things with Flash.
Some comments in the Ars article had a very cogent observation: there's no AI assistant in Animate, and it's probably based on a very old code base, so it would be hard to retrofit it. Which means Adobe can't realistically increase its current price of $23/month. If they can't make more money from the product, kill it. Occam's Razor that's a pretty good guess.
And yes, people are already thinking Adobe cannot be trusted and are rethinking their production pipelines.
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/02/adobe-reverses-decision-to-discontinue-animate-after-a-lot-of-confusion-and-angst/
