Adobe Photoshop Touch

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

~ the last words ~

adobe photoshop touch was a paid tablet app that tried to be photoshop on a touchscreen. ten dollars on ipad, five dollars on iphone, with cloud sync to creative cloud. it had layers, selection tools, brushes, a tap-and-hold ui, and a workflow built around fingers instead of a mouse. it was the most serious attempt anyone made at bringing real photoshop to a tablet before the ipad pro existed.

it shipped first on android tablets in november 2011, reached ipad in february 2012, and reached phones in early 2013. it was discontinued on 21 may 2015 with the apps pulled from the store on 28 may 2015. the replacement was not one app but six: photoshop mix, photoshop fix, shape cc, color cc, brush cc, comp cc. adobe called it a strategy. users called it splitting a working tool into pieces that no longer added up.

i never bought photoshop touch. by 2012 i was on a desktop linux workstation with gimp open in one window and a virtualbox of windows in the other for the rare time a client file needed real photoshop. tablet photoshop felt like a category that did not exist yet. it turned out adobe agreed: the actual photoshop for ipad shipped in 2019, four years after they killed touch, and was a different product built from scratch on the cc shared engine.

~ the record ~

~ what it could do ~

up to sixteen layers in the ipad version. selection tools that worked with a finger, a magic wand, brushes, basic filters, layer styles, text. you could import from creative cloud, edit, and push back. the trick was that it ran natively on the tablet, so it never felt like a remote desktop session. the constraint was the tablet hardware of 2012-2013, which meant low resolution canvases and a sense that you were doing rehearsal work, not finishing work.

~ why it died ~

adobe's stated reason was that they wanted apps that did one thing well rather than apps that tried to do everything badly. the unstated reason was that the tablets of 2012-2014 could not actually run photoshop, and pretending they could was costing them goodwill every time someone hit a wall. splitting the product into pieces let adobe ship faster on each piece and admit the limits without saying so out loud. the cc apps were never as ambitious as touch had been. they were also never as frustrating.

~ the long delay ~

adobe took four years from killing touch to shipping real photoshop on ipad in november 2019. in that gap procreate took the tablet illustration market, affinity photo took the tablet photo edit market, and the apple pencil rewrote what a tablet creative app should feel like. photoshop on ipad in 2019 launched into a market adobe no longer dominated by default. touch is the cautionary tale they spent four years not telling anyone about.

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