Adobe XD

» see adobe.com/products/xd as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

adobe XD shipped in 2016. by then figma was already in the browser, sketch had locked up the mac-only design tier, my design work was minimal and happening in whatever tool a teammate sent me a file in. i am a computer engineer working on edge AI in ankara. ui/ux is not my primary surface, XD was a product i had installed once or twice to open a handoff file. honestly, that was the whole relationship.

the product started as 'project comet' at adobe MAX october 2015. the goal was explicit: adobe had watched sketch take over the design tier between 2010 and 2015, and creative cloud was missing a vector UI design tool. the public beta launched on march 14 2016 as 'adobe experience design CC'. by 2017 the marketing dropped 'experience' from the name and it became adobe XD.

the feature set was reasonable. vector ui design with artboards. click-through prototypes you could share via url. a repeat grid feature for laying out lists and galleries that designers liked. plugin support arrived in 2018. component reuse and content-aware layout shipped through 2019 and 2020. adobe pushed XD aggressively in creative cloud bundling and the user base hit somewhere between five and seven million depending on how you counted.

figma was the thing XD never caught. figma had launched in 2016 the same year as XD but in the browser, with real-time collaboration as the differentiator. designers cared about that. by 2020 figma had become the default UI design tool at every company that paid attention. for whatever reason, XD's response was always one feature cycle behind, the browser-first architecture decision was the one adobe could not retrofit.

in september 2022 adobe announced an agreement to buy figma for 20 billion dollars. the strategic logic was admission: XD had lost, adobe needed to acquire its way back into the design tool tier. regulators in the EU and UK opened antitrust reviews and the deal collapsed on december 18 2022. adobe paid figma a 1 billion dollar termination fee. six months later, on june 22 2023, adobe quietly announced XD was discontinued as a purchasable item. existing license holders got maintenance mode. no new features. the active development team was reassigned.

~ the record ~

~ what it tried to be ~

XD was the sketch killer that arrived two years too late. sketch had defined the post-photoshop UI design workflow between 2010 and 2014 by being mac-only and vector-native. adobe spent a year and a half on project comet trying to clone the workflow with adobe's brand muscle behind it. honestly, the original 2016 version was thin (artboards plus a prototype link layer over basic vector) but adobe's distribution through creative cloud got it to scale quickly.

in fairness, by 2019 XD had real features. components were reusable and plugins covered most of the third-party design tooling ecosystem. the prototype layer handled voice triggers and gamepad input for some reason adobe seemed to care about. the product was technically competent. it was also locked into a desktop app architecture at the moment when design work was migrating to the browser.

~ the figma trap ~

figma's browser-first decision in 2012 was the strategic move that killed XD before XD shipped. design files lived in figma's cloud by default, multiple designers could edit the same artboard live. handoff to engineers happened by url instead of by exported zip. by 2020 every design team that switched off sketch went to figma instead of XD. anyway, XD shipped a 'coediting' feature in 2019 trying to match it but the architecture made the collaboration feel grafted on.

adobe's 2022 acquisition offer was the white flag. 20 billion dollars to buy the company that had outmaneuvered XD on the architecture decision. the EU CMA noticed that adobe owned XD and was buying its only real competitor, the UK CMA agreed. the deal died and adobe was left holding XD with no path forward.

~ the long tail ~

maintenance mode kept XD installable through 2024 and into 2026. the app still launches if you have a creative cloud subscription, the file format still opens. honestly, adobe stopped fixing things around late 2024. macOS sequoia introduced rendering bugs that never got patched. some plugins broke when the plugin API stopped getting updates.

the team that built XD was distributed across other adobe products. several leads ended up at figma or at framer in the following two years. the product page on adobe.com still exists but it has been a help article since 2024, not a sales surface. XD is the most expensive failed competitive attempt adobe made in the 2010s, and the figma termination fee is now itemized in adobe's annual reports as a reminder.

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