Could Harman take over Adobe Animate from Adobe?

[ylazy]

Hi!

Adobe Animate remains the number one choice for creating animated content for Flash/Air/HTML5 Canvas.

It's so sad that Adobe Animate has been discontinued.

Is there any possibility that Harman could obtain the Adobe Animate source code from Adobe and continue its development?

Users don't even need new features; they just expect serious bugs to be fixed.

If this were possible, I bet many people would be willing to pay for it, including me.

Thanks!

[marchbold]

Has there been any official announcement yet or is it just the normal silence from Adobe?

Would actually love to see integration with alternative tools maybe even help to get a swc export from things like Friction or similar developing tools.

I might be in a minority, but I normally only use Animate for asset creation and then write all app code in IntelliJ/VScode, so switching to another tool for this would be great.

[ylazy]

https://helpx.adobe.com/animate/kb/end-of-life.html

[manishpatel0404]

Apologies if this may not be the right place to ask this question. While typing Indic fonts in an AIR projector works perfectly well, when I paste this text into an Animate document, it breaks the text. Does Adobe Animate officially support Indic fonts or have they still not updated the Classic Text field to support this? Thanks.

[marchbold]

I don't know the answer to this one, but I'd suggest starting a new conversation about it as it's unrelated to this topic. Cheers

[ajwfrost]

FYI, some certainty at least:
https://helpx.adobe.com/animate/kb/end-of-life.html

We can't take over Adobe Animate sadly, because the source code for it is very much tied up with the rest of the Creative Cloud ecosystem and applications (a lot of shared components plus all the licensing stuff etc). But we were hoping to look at how to support a proper export of all assets to make them available for importing into replacement software (or to see whether other tools could have an "import fla" option).

thanks

[Michoko92]

I just received clarification from Adobe about the line in the FAQ saying "Access to your Animate files and project data will end on the date that support ends": This relates to Adobe Cloud Services -- you won't be able to sync files to/from Adobe Cloud storage at that point, or use "Cloud Documents", or use Adobe Fonts after that. Local files will still be able to be opened, and the software will continue to launch after March 2027 -- though only for as long as their "license handshake" in Creative Cloud still includes Animate, which will be removed at some point after EOL as they usually do, but no definitive cut-off date is set yet.

Thank you for sharing this. I'm quite upset with Adobe right now. We used their products ecosystem, thinking that it would be best practice to do so. We have many apps too, and they heavily rely on assets generated with Animate (SWF files containing fonts and screens layouts, SWC files containing assets libraries...). Even if Animate keeps working, as you say, how long will it take for them to disable Adobe Cloud handshake? Maybe one morning we'll launch Animate, and it simply won't work any longer. If this is not encouraging piracy, I don't know what it is.

[KupoGames]

I think people who have continued to rely on timeline scripts to build applications are going to struggle and might be time for them to seriously consider a proper IDE and a code restructure?

Hey, that's me!

[M4rkY4]

I just received clarification from Adobe about the line in the FAQ saying "Access to your Animate files and project data will end on the date that support ends": This relates to Adobe Cloud Services -- you won't be able to sync files to/from Adobe Cloud storage at that point, or use "Cloud Documents", or use Adobe Fonts after that. Local files will still be able to be opened, and the software will continue to launch after March 2027 -- though only for as long as their "license handshake" in Creative Cloud still includes Animate, which will be removed at some point after EOL as they usually do, but no definitive cut-off date is set yet.

Thanks or letting us know, interestingly they literally wrote "For all other customers, technical support, application access, and the ability to download content will be available until March 1, 2027. ", which contradicts their answer.

[Fancy2209]

They undid it! Adobe Animate will now go into Maintenance Mode!
https://community.adobe.com/announcements-539/adobe-animate-end-of-life-and-support-timeline-1548220
https://helpx.adobe.com/animate/kb/maintenance-mode.html
https://twitter.com/mesh/status/2018812283158470726

[marchbold]

They undid it! Adobe Animate will now go into Maintenance Mode! https://community.adobe.com/announcements-539/adobe-animate-end-of-life-and-support-timeline-1548220 https://helpx.adobe.com/animate/kb/maintenance-mode.html https://twitter.com/mesh/status/2018812283158470726

Wow! Never seen Adobe do something like that before!! Great news, but I still think we should push for developments in this area, more tooling is essential :)

[Menard1965]

What does that mean for us.
Adobe just send me Mail, that Adobe Animate is stopping developement, aof Adonbe Animate with march 2026.

I have 8 Apps in 7 languages that are made wit Adobe Animate. on Windows, MacOS, IOS and Android.

What does that mean for me and what does Harman say about that. I really need help.

That the whole income of my company

help !!!!!
Michael

[Fancy2209]

You can still open local files, just make sure to not keep them on the Cloud and you'll be fine at least until 2030

[Menard1965]

I use the Animations severly to have interactive Apps, for Windows, MacOS, Android and IOS. By now everything was working like charm, also with your Help - always.

I am living from this app, so i think i am bancrupt, we just launched a new APP, a E-Book with Animations, e-Learning content, question books that ca be loaded, Bookmarksystem.

We worked on that 15 month

So i have no clue at all, how i can transport or migrate to other tools ???

[ajwfrost]

I think this is the key -> how to migrate to other tools. I think there are a number of alternatives for timeline-based animations but I have no experience of any of them, have just seen them mentioned on forums. Or maybe it's an opportunity for Moonshine IDE to add this capability..! though probably way too much effort to actually try to replicate the features of Animate that people use..

[manishpatel0404]

We can still use the older versions to create our animations, assets, etc. for our e-learning products. So, I guess the only important question for us is, "How does this impact Harman's plans for the future with AIR"? If Harman does continue with AIR, will it still support SWF?

[Menard1965]

Yes thats my point also

[ajwfrost]

I don't think we would ever not support SWF! There may be some changes we can make so e.g. per the previous suggestion of using SVG, but that's something that could be handled in addition or as an input to the compiler to create a SWF (i.e. we could add a tag to the SWF format). Lots of options but the key things should be (a) we ensure all the existing/legacy content is going to still work and be accessible/maintainable, and (b) we ensure people can move to a new tool in order to continue with animation-based apps that can be exported to SWF.

[manishpatel0404]

Thanks @ajwfrost
That's good to know. For our animation needs, CS6 is enough for us and we own perpetual licences for this. Everything else, in terms of deployment of our e-learning products happens with AIR. So, as long as you keep supporting and developing AIR, Adobe closing down Animate will not bother us in any way. Of course, as you mention in point (b), if there is indeed a tool that exports SWF, we would not mind migrating to such a tool because then, we would at least be working with a more reliable developer than Adobe. I say this because in the past, we were heavily invested in Adobe's Director (which was a wonderful product that Adobe killed in favour of Flash/Animate) for deployment of our e-learning products and then moved on to AIR when Adobe closed down Director. In this sense, I do understand how others feel when a tool they are heavily invested in is killed.

[ylazy]

Related: #3533

[Menard1965]

My Point ist not only the Animations. I use Animate together with Actionscript to build full apps.

We have a boat simulation with true Physics (Box2D integration)
We have a Map Tool for Virtual Naviagtion
and other

[Menard1965]

there is a Petition that i want to share
https://www.change.org/p/ve-adobe-animate-don-t-let-this-essential-creative-tool-disappear
or
https://c.org/KQBWx4vXXW

[ajwfrost]

Looks good and is getting a reasonable number of signatures fairly swiftly...

I'm also curious, how many of the folk using Animate (and also present on this forum) are actually Enterprise customers? We are (i.e. Harman) hence I didn't get the email notification as I suspect that would have gone to the IT/licensing team, but I'm curious whether there's a big overlap between enterprise licensing vs Animate usage..

thanks

[FliplineStudios]

I'm also curious, how many of the folk using Animate (and also present on this forum) are actually Enterprise customers? We are (i.e. Harman) hence I didn't get the email notification as I suspect that would have gone to the IT/licensing team, but I'm curious whether there's a big overlap between enterprise licensing vs Animate usage..

@ajwfrost We're not Enterprise customers, mainly because we're a smaller team and the Enterprise Tier apparently starts at 11+ licenses, and anything less uses the regular "Teams" tier without the 3-year support window. We did submit a contact form request to Adobe about the Enterprise Tier, to see if it's possible to get access for smaller teams, as that extra 2 years of access would definitely be useful!

[Menard1965]

I want to add that when Adobe AIR moved to Harman, it was a real highlight for all developers.
We always received help quickly — often on the same day, sometimes even within hours.
Therefore, I want to say thank you to Andrew and the whole team for everything so far, and I truly hope this great support will continue.

[2cde]

https://helpx.adobe.com/animate/kb/maintenance-mode.html

It seems that the discontinuation of Animate has been withdrawn.

[ylazy]

Great news!

[ajwfrost]

Yes some changes to the plans it seems .. see also a post from the legendary Mike Chambers (wth a lot of comments) https://www.reddit.com/r/adobeanimate/comments/1qv5yju/updates_on_the_status_of_adobe_animate/

[pavelzmolik]

I've just read it.. and maybe you heard that boulder drop to the floor from my heart.. Glad to hear that Adobe is listening its community..

[ylazy]

Glad to hear that Adobe is listening its community

I don' think so. They're listening their stock price.

Anyway that's great news.

[ylazy]

TimTom's Going To Save Animation:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7tjpdy1lBw4

[Fancy2209]

It looks suspicious
This person doesn't seem to really have much actual coding experience from what I've seen
But we'll see