Adobe Renaming 'Flash Professional' to ‘Animate’, Shifts Focus to HTML5

As part of its round of November Creative Cloud updates, Adobe announced plans to rebrand its Flash Professional CC software as Animate CC to acknowledge a growing shift away from Flash.

In a blog post on its website, Adobe explains that more than a third of content created in Flash Pro CC uses HTML5, leading the company to rename the software to "accurately represent its position as the premier animation tool for the web and beyond."

Along with changing the name of Flash Professional CC, Adobe is working on major feature updates for the software, including improved drawing, illustration, and authoring support and integration with Adobe Stock and Creative Cloud Libraries.

While Adobe is rebranding to better focus on HTML5, it says the new Animate CC will continue to support Flash (SWF) and Air formats as "first-class citizens," with work already underway on Flash Player 12.

The new Adobe Animate CC app will be available starting in January. Previous versions of Flash Professional will continue to be available.

Flash has been on its way out for several years now. Apple's refusal to support flash on its iOS devices was a major blow to Adobe and declining use led Adobe to eliminate its Flash player for mobile devices in 2011. Major websites have largely transitioned from Flash due to never ending security vulnerabilities, with Amazon no longer accepting Flash ads and Facebook's lead security engineer calling for the death of Flash.