Tech
After backlash, Adobe cancels Adobe Animate shutdown and puts app on ‘maintenance mode’
Adobe is putting on hold its plan to discontinue Adobe Animate following intense backlash from its customers after it announced plans to shut down the 2D animation software amid an increased focus on its investments in AI.
“We are not discontinuing or removing access to Adobe Animate. Animate will continue to be available for both current and new customers, and we will ensure you continue to have access to your content,” the company wrote in a post on Wednesday.
Adobe’s Monday announcement about discontinuing Animate was met with incredulity, disappointment, and anger, and users aired concerns about the lack of alternatives that mirror Animate’s functionality.
The company changed its tune on Wednesday, saying there would no longer be a “deadline or date by which Animate will no longer be available.”
“Adobe Animate is in maintenance mode for all customers. This applies to individual, small business, and enterprise customers. Maintenance mode means we will continue to support the application and provide ongoing security and bug fixes, but we are no longer adding new features. Animate will continue to be available for both new and existing users - we will not be discontinuing or removing access to Adobe Animate,” it said.
One customer, posting on X, had asked Adobe to at least open source the software rather than abandon it. Commenters on the thread responded with angst, saying things like, “this is legit gonna ruin my life,” and, “literally what the hell are they doing? animate is the reason a good chunk of adobe users even subscribe in the first place.”
On Monday, the company updated its support site and sent emails to existing customers announcing that Adobe Animate would be discontinued on March 1, 2026. Enterprise customers would continue to receive technical support through March 1, 2029, to ease the transition, the company said at the time. Other customers would have support through March of next year.
Adobe explained its decision to discontinue the program in an FAQ, saying, “Animate has been a product that has existed for over 25 years and has served its purpose well for creating, nurturing, and developing the animation ecosystem. As technologies evolve, new platforms and paradigms emerge that better serve the needs of the users. Acknowledging this change, we are planning to discontinue supporting Animate.”
Reading between the lines, it seemed as if Adobe was saying that Animate no longer represents the current direction of the company, which is now more focused on products that incorporate AI technologies.
What’s surprising is that Adobe couldn’t even recommend software that would fully replace what customers are losing with Animate. Instead, it said customers with a Creative Cloud Pro plan can use other Adobe apps to “replace portions of Animate functionality.”
For instance, it suggested that Adobe After Effects can support complex keyframe animation using the Puppet tool, and Adobe Express can be used for animation effects that can be applied to photos, videos, text, shapes, and other design elements.
There were hints that Adobe was headed in this direction when no mention was made of Animate at the company’s annual Adobe Max conference. Plus, no 2025 version of the software was released.
Before switching to “maintenance mode,” Abode had intended for the software to continue to work for those who have it downloaded. Typically, Adobe charged $34.49 per month for the software, which dropped to $22.99 with a 12-month commitment. The annual prepaid plan was available for $263.88. Now, the company says it will be available to new users, as well.
Some users have been recommending other animation programs to use as a replacement, including Moho Animation and Toon Boom Harmony.
Updated, February 4, 2026, to note that Adobe reversed its decision and announced the software would be placed in maintenance mode instead of discontinued.
Tech
Mirage raises $75M to continue building models for its AI video editing app Captions
Mirage, the maker of video-editing app Captions, has raised $75 million in growth financing from General Catalyst’s Customer Value Fund (CVF).
Over the past year, the startup has made significant changes both to its product and corporate identity. The startup rebranded from Captions to Mirage to position itself as an AI lab that produces different models and also caters to industries like advertising and marketing. It has also trained a model specifically for pacing, framing, and attention dynamics in short videos.
The company also switched to a freemium model in January 2025 to better compete with apps like ByteDance’s CapCut and Meta’s Edits, which was released later in the year. It now offers a video-creation suite as well, with some of the features from Captions, that lets companies create and distribute videos in bulk.
Mirage’s co-founder and CEO Gaurav Misra said that the company aims to create more models. However, he didn’t specify what its next set of models would do, only saying that they would be focused on “assembly intelligence” — basically putting together a video using different sources and components.
Speaking about Mirage’s new audio model, which it claims can preserve accents in generated videos, Misra said, “The reason for the audio model was that we noticed that there was a gap in accents because a lot of our users are international. Accents are just very important. There was my own dad’s example. He was trying to use the app, and he would say a word in an Indian accent, and it would always make it sound like he’s talking in an American accent.”
According to data from analytics firm Appfigures, Captions has been downloaded over 3.2 million times in the last 365 days and has brought in $28.4 million in in-app revenue. Misra said the platform has been used to create more than 200 million videos so far, and that it has attracted an international user base, with only 25% of its revenue coming from the U.S.
Currently, Mirage’s marketing suite is available on the web, and Captions largely offers a mobile-first editing suite. The company aims to merge these two platforms to better target small businesses that may be looking to create marketing videos.
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Pranav Singhvi, managing director of General Catalyst’s CVF fund, said Mirage has great product-market fit.
“Mirage’s business equation is extremely figured out. They know exactly how to spend that dollar and generate a very attractive ROI. If you think about the market they’re going after, it’s in a sense an infinite total addressable market. You can start out in the creator world, the influencer world, and then use that as a mechanism to sell to enterprises as well,” Singhvi told TechCrunch.
There are tons of companies building AI video-generation pipelines for marketing. Canva has introduced several tools around marketing creation and tracking, while platforms like D-ID, HeyGen, Webflow, and Avataar have been releasing new models and features.
However, Singhvi seems confident about Mirage’s positioning and unit economics. “Regardless of what the other tools are out there, Mirage is clearly ahead of the pack from a unit economics standpoint. Ultimately, it’s all a reflection of their product,” he said.
Mirage aims to use the fresh capital to fuel growth, and expand in high-growth Asian markets.
Tech
Spotify’s new SongDNA feature maps how your favorite songs are connected
Spotify announced on Tuesday the global rollout of a new feature, SongDNA, that lets listeners more deeply explore their favorite music.
Now available to Premium subscribers on iOS and Android, the feature provides an interactive experience that lets users trace other components of a song beyond the singer, songwriter, or musician. With SongDNA, listeners could explore other connections, like who may have covered that song, plus other information like samples, interpolations, or what other projects the song’s collaborators have also been involved in.
The idea is something of an expansion to the existing “About the Song” feature, allowing Spotify’s customers to learn more about the writers, producers, and collaborators behind their favorite music. This could lead users to see how artists are connected to and influenced by one another’s work. For those in the music industry itself, the feature could help them find new collaborators, producers, engineers, and others they may want to work with.
It also offers those in the background of music production more visibility and credibility than they’ve previously had in the streaming age.
TechCrunch reported in October that Spotify was developing the SongDNA feature as a way to help users discover music through a song’s credits, after references to the feature were spotted in the app’s code by reverse engineer Jane Manchun Wong. The following month, the company officially confirmed its plans to launch SongDNA in early 2026.
In part, SongDNA has been built on top of data from the online community-built music database WhoSampled, which Spotify acquired last year. The feature also competes with TIDAL’s interactive credits, which similarly focus on the contributors behind the songs you stream.
“By bringing collaborators, samples, and covers together in one place, we’re making it easier for fans to discover new music and see how songs connect and come to life—while giving songwriters, producers, and rightsholders meaningful recognition for the role they play in creating it,” said Jacqueline Ankner, Spotify’s head of Songwriter & Publisher Partnerships, in a statement.
The feature is rolling out now in beta to Premium users globally across iOS and Android devices, with plans for the rollout to be complete sometime in April.
Tech
Snapchat’s new ‘AI Clips’ Lens format turns photos into five-second videos
Snapchat announced on Tuesday that it’s launching AI Clips in Lens Studio, its platform that lets creators design and publish AR and AI effects called Lenses. The new Clips are an AI-powered Lens format that transforms a single photo into a five-second video.
Unlike open-ended text-to-video tools, AI Clips are designed as a closed-prompt experience, where Lens creators design the Lens, and users can tap it to generate a video from their own photos.
For example, a Lens creator could design a Lens that allows users to generate a video of themselves walking down a red carpet using their own photo.
Snapchat says both experienced and new developers can use the new Lens format to turn a single prompt into a published Lens in minutes without the need for external tools.
AI Clips are available to Snapchat users who are subscribed to that platform’s Lens+ offering, which costs $8.99 per month. As its name suggests, Lens+ gives users access to exclusive Lenses and AR experiences, along with the features available as part of the standard Snapchat+ subscription.
“For the first time, developers can build and publish photo-to-video AI directly to Snapchat from the GenAI Suite in Lens Studio,” Snapchat wrote in a blog post. “There’s currently nothing else on the market that combines closed-prompt AI video generation with direct photo input, real distribution, and monetization.”
Lens creators enrolled in Lens+ Payouts, Snapchat’s monetization program that allows developers to earn money from their Lenses, can earn revenue from the AI Clips they create.
Snapchat isn’t the only platform focused on letting users create AI clips from their own photos, as YouTube announced last week that it was rolling out “Reimagine,” a new feature that lets users transform a single frame from an existing YouTube Short into an eight-second clip using their own photo.
The launch of AI Clips comes the same day that Snapchat announced that users created nearly two trillion Snaps, or 63,000 Snaps per second, in 2025.
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