I don’t often like to rant but XD is fascinating to me as an example of trying to work out what went so wrong in building it. Every time I open it (and by force its companion Creative Cloud updater) it does something radical. Last time the updater just started playing a loud buzzing noise (like a crashed audio thread). If I have open a file open too long (a few minutes), it freezes then crashes when I try to exit. There was period where I’d have to click through slow you-don’t-have access dialogs to a file I do have access to. This is all on a single project over the last few weeks
Adobe has brilliant engineers and talent and some parts of XD are well built and I want XD to succeed. It makes me speculate if it's a case of the original team being moved onto other projects or management exploring outsourcing
fact is that if XD wasn't part of Adobe's ecosystem it would have never gained any traction. It became as popular as it its because its pushed down with the same subscription as Photoshop and the rest of the gang so it makes no sense for someone who has the suite to also pay for another product but it is a very badly made piece of software even though they started it from scratch and doesn't have all the baggage that applications like Photoshop have.
I do have XD installed just to view designs but I don't really design in it and what amazes me is how often it gets updated, almost weekly.
XD is free. Some features like online sharing are restricted to Creative Cloud subscribers.
But at least XD allows you to save your design files locally. Figma forces you to use their cloud storage, which is pretty much a non-starter for me. I like to store my design files with the rest of the project, which is impossible with Figma.
Adobe has brilliant engineers and talent and some parts of XD are well built and I want XD to succeed. It makes me speculate if it's a case of the original team being moved onto other projects or management exploring outsourcing