Adobe XD Might Be Reaching The End Of The Line
Massive tech companies like Adobe often maintain equally massive catalogs of programs and services for users to buy and utilize. The thing is, though, when you reach a certain point of growth, maintaining all of those products at once becomes unsustainable, and some of the proverbial fat needs to be trimmed. This may not always result in a sudden, hard end-of-service, but it may result in the beginning of a quiet sunsetting process, meant to gradually steer users away from older services and toward the new.
While Adobe has not publicly announced the sunsetting of any of its products, eagle-eyed users have noticed that web and mobile vector tool Adobe XD has disappeared from the company's digital shelves. Those who have checked the Adobe Products catalog have noticed that both Adobe XD and the entire UI and UX section are missing in action. Pending a proper press release from Adobe, the most obvious answer is that the company is winding down support for Adobe XD.
Comments and causes
Adobe XD users have been discussing the product's disappearance in the Adobe Support Community forums, speculating on its nature and cause. This discussion prompted a response from an actual Adobe employee, Rishabh Tiwari, who more or less confirmed the truth of the matter.
"Adobe XD is no longer available for purchase as a single application but will continue to be supported for existing users," Tiwari wrote. "XD will continue to be available as part of our Adobe Creative Cloud All Apps subscription. We will continue to support existing Adobe XD customers."
In layman's terms this means that, while those who already own Adobe XD can continue to use it freely, no more copies of the product are being sold. Users have speculated that the reason for this sunsetting lay in Adobe's acquisition of collaborative interface design tool Figma near the end of 2022.
As many of Figma's features overlap with those found in Adobe XD, having both on the market simultaneously would seemingly be redundant. Ergo, Adobe has begun winding down support of Adobe XD in order to potentially put its weight behind the distribution and support of Figma.
At the time of writing, Adobe has yet to comment on Adobe XD's disappearance. It is entirely possible that, once its acquisition of Figma finalizes, it'll formally discontinue the product. In the event something prevents the acquisition from going through, though — such as a potential anti-competitive investigation in the EU — Adobe could still theoretically walk it back.