Love-and-hate story of Figma and Adobe
Ever since Figma was announced to be acquired by Adobe, there was a bitter taste in waiting for some form of commercialization. I hate that dev mode is a paid feature since Feb 2024. I even read the Adobe stocks slipped when they made the announcement back in 2021. So apparently even Adobe’s side was a bit unhappy.
Now about Figma! The beloved tool of designers. In 2023, Figma announced that developers would have dev mode which replaced inspect panel. Our developers worked fine with inspect panel. Now dev mode only came into my radar (as a UX Manager) because Figma announced dev mode in Beta would become paid in 2024. And on 1st of February 2024, we all faced the music! Not everything was restricted to developers, they could still access layers, layouts, typography, colors, exporting assets, basically developers can do their job in a way. Not the efficient way. The reason for making a UX tool’s user experience less smooth was money, I believe. What I initially believed was the big €€€ that will land in Adobe’s pockets as part of Adobe commercialisation was infact wrong. With Adobe and Figma mutually terminating the partnership on grounds of regulatory findings, it seems their market monopoly is not the only thing that will not happen. Making Figma dev mode paid, means the “love for product” from design and developer community slips, therefore their budgetting stakeholders no longer have the back of Figma. Did they they lose a good percentage of their market to Adobe while mis-led by Adobe to capitalize or just being greedy ? Only time will tell..
