{"id":738,"date":"2026-02-03T21:49:02","date_gmt":"2026-02-03T21:49:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.confidant.ca\/blog\/?p=738"},"modified":"2026-02-04T17:23:39","modified_gmt":"2026-02-04T17:23:39","slug":"animate-is-toast","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.confidant.ca\/blog\/2026\/animate-is-toast\/","title":{"rendered":"Animate is toast"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><em>Edit: After this article was written, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.reddit.com\/r\/adobeanimate\/comments\/1qv5yju\/updates_on_the_status_of_adobe_animate\/?share_id=nl0lddkKGAN1dcnPaSomF&amp;utm_content=2&amp;utm_medium=ios_app&amp;utm_name=ioscss&amp;utm_source=share&amp;utm_term=1\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Adobe backpedaled on their announcement <\/a>and changed the status of Adobe Animate to &#8220;maintenance mode&#8221; instead of full discontinuation. It seems they are in full-on damage control now. <\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I learned today that <a href=\"https:\/\/helpx.adobe.com\/ca\/animate\/kb\/end-of-life.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Adobe has decided to discontinue its Animate software<\/a>. I abandoned it about 10 years ago now when so many of its best tools got translated into the Haxe language. I suppose I had a feeling that this day would come eventually. Perhaps I\u2019m surprised that it took this long.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Adobe cited \u201cnew platforms and paradigms\u201d being the reason for their decision. I guess that boils down to the following:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Bandwidth<\/strong><strong>:<\/strong> Video is ubiquitous now. Who needs small file sizes for animations? Why not use software that was always for video?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>App <\/strong><strong>D<\/strong><strong>evelopment<\/strong><strong>: <\/strong>Technical requirements are increasing in complexity. Developers who could push the technical limits of the Animate software soon needed to go beyond what it could do, and found themselves in a team environment.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Market Share:<\/strong> Adobe&#8217;s software has been \u201ccalling home\u201d for a long time, for licensing, features, and statistics. They have been collecting data on everything and daily usage will certainly have played a part in their decision.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>AI:<\/strong> Unfortunately this will certainly also be sapping away the need for Animate. Why spend hours tweening and editing keyframes when you can write a paragraph for your AI agent to animate for you?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">So\u2014thanks for the laughs, Adobe. I understand that you need to do this! <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">ps: if you need <a href=\"https:\/\/gamefromscratch.com\/adobe-kill-off-adobe-animate\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">alternatives to Animate, check out this great article from GameFromScratch<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Edit: After this article was written, Adobe backpedaled on their announcement and changed the status of Adobe Animate to &#8220;maintenance mode&#8221; instead of full discontinuation. It seems they are in full-on damage control now. I learned today that Adobe has decided to discontinue its Animate software. I abandoned it about 10 years ago now when &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.confidant.ca\/blog\/2026\/animate-is-toast\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Animate is toast<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[3,47],"tags":[31,8,58],"class_list":["post-738","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-development","category-technology","tag-flash","tag-software","tag-video"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p28GE6-bU","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.confidant.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/738","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.confidant.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.confidant.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.confidant.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.confidant.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=738"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.confidant.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/738\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":745,"href":"https:\/\/www.confidant.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/738\/revisions\/745"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.confidant.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=738"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.confidant.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=738"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.confidant.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=738"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}