Having been a user of this software for more than half my life, seeing this announcement is shocking but completely unsurprising. I've never seen such blatant disdain for a product's userbase in my life, and this feels like the point it was almost destined to come to. There are so many new applications for creating digital animation, but this one from the very beginning just had the juice. The irony of this all is that it wasn't built as an animation software, but for making interactive websites... ads, company portals, corporate shit. Multimedia projects created in this format were displayed using Flash Player, a browser supported plug-in. Through Flash's entire lifetime, it felt as if Adobe was dragged kicking and screaming... never truly accepting the functionality it had organically developed as an artistic tool. From Adobe's perspective, it was the FORMAT that was the value; that is, they wanted Flash Player to be THE way to display multimedia across the web. Adobe DID fight for Flash, but the fight was for dominance over web multimedia... in the oughts, it was THE way to display multimedia on your website. But little losses here and there, like Apple refusing to support the format for smart phones, lead to a steady decline. An adaptive shift to HTML5 support was added to Flash in order to maintain relevance, but the clear goal of total multimedia dominance was shattered. This shift marked the name change to "Animate"... a name that serves as a hollow non-acknowledgement of its consistently strong and loyal userbase of artists, but belies the gross truth of their true intentions: to continue to claw for dominance in the field of web-based multimedia. Through all this, Flash/Animate continued to be an industry standard for digital 2D animation. Both independent and professional cartoonists utilized it to create beloved projects... even today. The corporate politics involved in the jockey for control of web-multimedia kept Adobe consistently blind to the voices of its most loyal users. One famous example is that Flash was notoriously terrible at exporting and rendering video from its proprietary vector-based format, so open-source software Swivel was developed by Mike Welsh to do it better. It may be difficult to understand this, but Flash was SO good, that even though it was consistently and profoundly broken, it was still often the tool of choice for animation. The reason all this is important for me to convey is... There was a feeling this company gave animators through the lifetime of their product that we were not a priority. Even as it became a standard in the professional animation industry, we often felt like an afterthought in favor of the ultimate goal of corporate dominance. The fact that Flash/Animate happened to be a fantastic program for making cartoons was a complete accident... and Adobe only ever saw that as a cute little bonus. So as we are getting more clarity around this decision to discontinue Animate... that Adobe sees this program as incompatible with their AI-based future goals... I think of how they've always operated: Staunchly anti-artist, anti-creative, and anti-human. This generative AI bullshit is nothing new, it is the next flavor of the same pathetic jockeying for corporate dominance. Artistic voices will continue to be ignored, while the artists they belong to will continue to be exploited. And that takes a mental toll on a creative mind. This announcement, to me, stands as a blatant admittance of this cycle. They do not care. And they never will. We should care. Art is humanity. I am so grateful for this new renaissance of indie animation, and am doubly grateful and honored to be a part of it. It is so easy for corporations like Adobe and even just normal people to discount the value of art, both for its own sake and for its influence on the world. But it IS important. Your art is important and YOU are important. Please continue to create. Even if for no other reason than just to spite these motherfuckers.