Never used it personally, I was a MOHO & Reallusion CTA user before I retired
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I’ll shed no tears for the remains of Flash finally being dumped in a grave.
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Though for many of us, we can’t really count just how much time we spent watching those flash animations and playing flash games. It was pretty transformative at the time due to the entertainment it opened up without having to download anything. For me anyway, it was an opening for the days when everyone did their stuff on the family computer and what was downloaded was tightly controlled.
But like in many cases these days, the reality of a need for high levels of security wrecked it as Apple blocked it from iOS and the browser makers began the process of trimming or even eliminating the ability to install plugins for the browser. It was a bit bloated for sure, but it was fun.
Adobe Animate at least attempted to keep Flash technology alive after it was excised from the browser market, but we fortunately have seen the development of several competent alternatives since then which even includes Blender.
However, good-riddance is not exactly the phrase being expressed by everyone as it still has its userbase and the actual phase out is a bit more serious than just not getting any more updates.
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Well, at least they keep the software available for a year and for 3 years if you’re “enterprise user”… Animate / flash was used quite a lot in the animation industry as it was the only vector animation program available therefore it quickly became a standard…
Also I feel sorry for the guy in the video, their video game looks pretty cool and now they’ll have to find some ways to export all that and probably redo 3/4 of the work in another engine + the time to learn new software… Like if making an indie project wasn’t difficult enough… Probably a few people find themselves in that same kind of situation…
That said, It’s been a while that it looked like a dead end, I think it’s no more used in web, IDK for games, in animation while probably a lot of people still use it, the future for vector anim is headed toward Harmony and Moho to some extent… If even me knows that given I’m really not into 2D animation I suppose it’s not that of a surprise for people working with it daily…
Anyway, would it be considered cynical to start betting on the next software to be discontinued ?
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I used flash a lot, it was great… Rip…
Edit: 
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Do you mean within the Adobe ecosystem or creative software in general?
I was thinking more about creative softwares in general…
But anyway, it’s more of a joke, it’s just that I think it’s less than a year that Modo was discontinued…
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One of the studios we work with at work has a full 20x10 animated series made entirely in Animate. That’s also their whole thing. They’re currently in the middle of season 2 production, but with news like this… I don’t know if they’re going to make it 
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Lightwave? The team that bought it has not brought a lot of news ever since the low-hanging fruit that could be gathered through things like plugin acquisition was done, and the overconfidence believing that Blender required 1500 dollars of plugins to simply match what came out of the box did not help either.
I also wonder what the risk is to the Substance Suite considering this news, but since Adobe is still building it out with things like modeling it may be safe for a while, especially if Adobe’s goal is to officially enter the 3D DCC market since a series of more specialized applications in one area may sometimes precede such a move.
In my opinion, as a person who has recently delved into 2D animation programs,
I have not seen anything from the list of TV Shows created with Adobe animate that could not have been achieved stylistically with a whole variety of other existing 2D animation programs.
Replacing it feature wise won’t be difficult
the understandable shock and dread you are seeing about this announcement is a matter of entrenched habits and ecosystem comfort bubbles and being locked into that ancient flash format.
its likely going to be very difficult ,or perhaps even impossible, to move those legacy assets over to another program in a truly usable state.
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Replacing it if you’re casually considering 2D animation is easy. Replacing multiple years of studio work in Animate is a whole different beast
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New clarification from Adobe:
TLDW: Maintenance mode no loss of access 
Thread title updated for clarity.
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Now that they had to backtrack and announce it’s on maintenance mode, people/studios depending on the program for current productions should be able to finish their projects without the fear of being blocked from accesing their files, but they should definitely start looking into alternatives for future projects.
Adobe cannot be trusted at all.
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I see the century of open source coming! 
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The FOSS movement is actually pretty strong right now because of how a lot of professional users even are getting tired with what appears to a new era of especially out of touch vendors that only respond to impending PR disasters. That it has gotten to this point is especially hazardous when the application you are using has internet connected DRM which allows for all of the software you pay for to have an expiration date.
Now I do not know exactly how much of this is due to FOSS just getting better or due to the old stereotypes used to build a case against FOSS suddenly not appearing that detrimental anymore in comparison, since at the least you are not expected to pay monthly to be ignored and have the rug pulled out from under you (not to mention the existence of forking as a failsafe).
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I think that the debate over the DCC applications is the wrong one to have.
I get that it is conceptually easier to talk about them as they are. And the same applies to the arguments about the quality of the toolsets and the skills developed over many years of usage.
But the thing that is often wrongfully conflated with the above is the problem of file standards and the level of transparency and openness in their development and maintenance.
People would have much less hate towards companies like Adobe if they could just jump with their projects to a different application. And I think this could be done with pressuring the companies into supporting open standards for project storage.
Those who offer great tools but lock your files in their ecosystem are doing nothing but bait-and-switch - and often it’s planned as a long-term strategy from the start.
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Yeah you’re right, the problem is more about how to move to another DCC with years of assets, rigs, animated shots produced under a software.
Having a standard for files ,I/O, isn’t simple, it’s basically the same problem than with 3D.
For 3D it’s something that has always been in the work, and while we’re starting to get there after like maybe more than 20 years of development of formats like OBJ, DXF, FBX, DAE, GLTF, OSL, ABC, USD… currently it’s still complex and limited.
2D industry is much more self contained so people are definitely not prepared to hear about a format to transfer a flash rig to harmony…
The format is also a translation of the specifics of the software. .blend file is a dump of the memory so it’s nearly impossible for any software to basically extract information from that. Furtermore even if we can use maybe GLTF to migrate stuff from blender to another DCC, we’ll loose most of the things that makes working with blender cool, like modifiers, materials and so on…
The best they can offer is to let people use the software for a very long period just like when we could actually buy the software !
That way people can migrate project at their own pace, which could take years for a company to fully migrate, one project at a time…
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DXF and FBX are the exact thing that should be worked around - and if possible flatly rejected in its entirety. Rest on the list is fine. Just imagine how harder life would be if these formats weren’t around.
For 2D animation - even a format that supports basic things like the timeline, FPS, keyframes, X/Y position and external asset loading could be a game changer. 100% compatibility is a pipedream and shouldn’t be the goal here. But things that are standardized across many applications are good candidates for inclusion in such format - kind of like every 3D format needs to support at least some form of mesh I/O.
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Sure !
It’s an interesting topic ! I think in 3D the way the pipeline work it’s kind of mandatory to have those I/O, since you generally work with multiple DCC at the same time.
For 2D animation the pipeline is much simpler. You generally export vectors form say illustrator to Animate and just renders from Animate to After for comp.
Maybe FX is done in a different app, but it’s just done on top of actual renders. They don’t need intricate IO as a 3D pipeline requires.
I suspect also that having a fixed format is also a way to lock your customers. So while 3D forced us to come up with open format that we can even write using the DCC scripting language… In 2D nothing forces vendors or users to do so…
On top of that 2D animation tend to be much more messy that 3D :
We know that in order to export using GLTF we need to enforce some constraints like no modifiers, basic shaders and so on…
This allows stuff to work, but that doesn’t make projects migration workable after the fact.
In 2D there is a more fire and forget approach in the workflow, that would probably make things break way more often…
So even if someone come up with an export format for 2D animation it’s very unclear how that would work with actual project file. Needless to say that those 2D animation software are much more limited in their API compared to a 3D software…
Anyway, I’m not saying you’re wrong, in fact having that around would be very beneficial ! It’s just that from my understanding of 2D animation I can see why it’s not the case and why it sounds complicated to pull out.