Adobe made a brave effort to put its Flash technology at the heart of the mobile media experience, but it was outwitted by Apple and is now being superseded by HTML5. But the company is certainly not irrelevant in mobile. Rather than trying to drive a full platform, Google-style, it has pulled back to its core strengths in content creation, and is building a rich system around its Creative Cloud, which will give it a mobile power base at last.
Its latest move is to acquire Aviary, a seven-year-old start-up which provides a photo editing platform and free SDK (software developers’ kit), for iOS, Android, HTML5 and Windows. This technology will be embedded into Creative Cloud, and will form the basis of a new ‘Creative SDK’, which Adobe says will simplify support for third party applications.
The Creative SDK is already under development but will be enhanced by the Aviary software. It will be built around a software library, which will be the foundation for the third party mobile apps, and will also tie the data and content back to the Creative Cloud suite of cloud-based tools. This will enable the mobile apps to more easily harness those tools and services, as well as being compatible with desktop products like Photoshop CC.
Aviary may also feed into another strategic Adobe platform, Behance, which it acquired in 2012 to be its entry point into social media – not a Facebook challenge, but a service specifically for creative professionals to share, communicate and collaborate. Behance’s co-founder Scott Belsky is now Adobe’s VP of products and community and has been helping to drive the extension of Creative Cloud to more third party apps and a broader ecosystem.
Aviary’s CEO Tobias Peggs wrote in a blog post: “Aviary’s HQ in New York City is very close to the offices of Behance, the creative community that joined Adobe 18 months ago – and that is now a cornerstone of Adobe’s Creative Cloud offering … [Adobe is] driving an initiative to extend Adobe technology to third party creative applications, an effort that manifested itself in June when Adobe launched its Creative SDK in private beta. As we all talked (and talked, and talked…), it became obvious that we shared a strong vision for mobile creativity.”
Adobe said, during its recent third party financial report, that it had ended Q3 with more than 2.81m paid Creative Cloud subscriptions, up sharply from 502,000 in the previous quarter. During that presentation, CEO Shantanu Narayen outlined a three-pronged strategy to keep that growth momentum going – aggressive conversion of desktop Adobe software users to Creative Cloud; tailored offerings, such as specific implementations for photographers, to attract new users; and the addition of more mission critical services and mobile apps, to put the platform at the center of customers’ activities.