The Silent End of Adobe XD

Can't say it's a huge surprise. I used it daily for years and even prior to the Figma acquisition, the features being released in new versions seemed odd (voice prototyping?) and the pace of release was slow while Figma steamed ahead.

There were numerous quirks on Windows that you just had to live with (alt-tabbing between apps when the keyboard stopped working every 10 minutes was a highlight). Changed to Figma for UI and haven't looked back. Thanks to those engineers who did work on it and gave us a non-Mac alternative to Sketch - I still miss the Repeat Grid feature.

Really sad news. I use XD since it was released, it is not perfect but it is robust and has a decent feature coverage. I tried Figma and the first day was a disaster. The UI is cluttered, the ontology is overly complicated and the worst: the web app aspect. It has thrown 401 errors on me, I never thought a desktop app would throw http errors. It is far more resource demanding than XD, and it lags everywhere, the flow from design to prototype mode is too slow, it does not feel it is “batteries-included “ like XD. Sure, it has a lot of functionality, but I don’t need them for 99% of projects. Being too “capable”, you’re forced to use the complex toolset also for simple tasks. Not every project needs comprehensive design modularization, so Figma is terrible for quick prototyping and one-offs. Figma sure focus too much on being the tool for large projects, with modularization, collaboration, etc. But again, most of projects are just simple and small. It does not have the Adobe “feel”. I design with Adobe tools since I was a kiddo and their tools have a dry and robust feeling to it. Almost as if you were directly manipulating objects within an OOP environment. They don’t try too hard to create sugary abstraction layers. Being like that it allows you to get a grip of the system and it makes them pretty hackable. XD has the “worse is better” thing going for it. While Figma seems to be the “right thing” but poorly executed. M&A is the sure way to destroy a company’s DNA.

When Adobe and Macromedia merged this happened to LiveMotion and GoLive. 5 years later it happened to Flash too. I really like Figma mainly for it's platform agnosticism (I work in Linux desktop). I suspect this will be pay-walled in the next few years, despite promises, to make support consistent with their other cloud tools.

With Flash, there was an internal hatred so deep that it's UI model for animation caught on while the abstract bezier key framing of After Effects did not in this market. They wanted it dead because they lost touch with this market. I feel like the free web-based appeal of Figma over XD may lead to the same internal agenda. Fingers crossed that I'm wrong.

Adobe is doing a dangerous thing here, betting everything on a fully greenlit acquisition of Figma.

If that falls through, and there's a very likely chance it will, they will have a serious problem.

It's very sad to see Adobe XD go, it was honestly a very good app during its first trial when it was free.

I don’t know anything about it, but I can say “XD” is is real nothing product name.