Few Adobe apps? Working in the video/media creation space, here is the current status of the apps that I use:
Photoshop - slow. New desirable features (for the artists using it) come once every 2/3 years. Now tries to cloud save even when you don’t want it to.
Competitors: Affinity Photo
Outlook: many if not most photo only users I know of have moved on from Adobe products. Seems to be mostly used in the photo retouching and editing industry.
Adobe Premiere - slow. Unusable for anything longer than 10-30 minutes in length. Anything longer is by rule done in AVID instead. Extremely prone to crashes. Buggy. Some tools have decreased in quality (ie type tool). Overall customer satisfaction is from my experience low. Live Link, the ability to have a linked media between Premiere and After Effects, is so unreliable that I would only expect its use by first year video editors. Anything beyond that I would question that individuals intelligence.
Competitors: Final Cut X, Davinci Resolve, AVID
Outlook: Although Avid dominates in long form, Premiere should remain in place for shorter material - music videos, advertising and corporate video. Resolve is getting better but UI is heavily opinionated which turns some people off. Final Cut was given up on by the industry (unfairly in my view) due to botched launch. FCPX is however in my view a far superior product.
Adobe After Effects: incredibly slow. Similar to photoshop has a low cadence of desirable features - particularly for one of the core user bases - 2D Motion designers - for whom features requested 10 years ago are still not coming. Adobe relies on plugin makers extending its functionality and making it useful.
Competitors: NUKE and Cavalry
Outlook: NUKE, once considered the slowest renderer on the planet, is now faster than after effects since they’ve slowly converted the tools to GPU.
Cavalry is still a young software. UI/UX is so radically different from After effects however it’s hard to see people make the switch.
The link with Illustrator is what keeps after effects unassailable. For now.
Adobe general outlook: in the creative communities im a part of, Adobe is widely regarded as a useless leeching company that’s locked away decades of solid software development (done in the distant past) behind a subscription wall. In the last 10 years they have failed to innovate in any significant aspect. Actually important updates that help folks get work done are a really rare occurrence. Overall the general view of Adobe products is that they are bad and getting worse. There’s constant talk about alternatives and how to avoid Adobe products in the pipeline if possible.