ArtCraft: Adobe's worst nightmare begins
A new breed of creative software is challenging Adobe's dominance. And it's only just getting started.
ArtCraft has just thrown a massive spanner into Adobe’s ultra-profitable corporate machinery. A new collection of free, open-source creative applications is taking aim at Adobe’s Creative Cloud empire. Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, Lightroom and much more are following. No subscriptions. No signups. No disguised "I'm-robbing-you" corporate babble.
These applications are still in their infancy, but the implications for Adobe’s long-standing market dominance could be enormous.
I spent the whole afternoon putting ArtCraft’s main applications through their paces. They’re still early builds, yet nowhere near as buggy as I’d expected. Quite the opposite. Delightfully fast, stable and smooth.
First surprise: the size. Fully installed, each ArtCraft application I tested is roughly a tenth the size of its Adobe equivalent. Installation? Under a minute. And hardly any of those pesky service files Adobe likes to scatter all over your hard drive.
The interface is a bit different, but definitely familiar. Adobe purists might moan. I actually like Craft’s little interface quirks and touches. Tools, menus, floating panels, functions - all exactly where they should be, doing exactly what they’re meant to do.
Support for .psd and .ai files is there. It’s not quite as seamless as Adobe’s native handling, but it’s perfectly workable. You soon get used to it.
However, DesignCraft won’t open .indd files directly. But it will read and save in .idml format. So, pro InDesign users, you know the drill.
Of course, these are early days. There will be bugs, missing features and compatibility headaches. Nobody seriously expects a young, open-source project to match decades of Adobe development overnight. But that’s hardly the point.
The real question is how quickly that gap might close. AI-assisted software development is changing the economics of building complex applications. What once required enormous teams, vast budgets, and years of development can increasingly be accomplished with a fraction of those resources.
And that should make Adobe rather nervous.
Verdict? I’m impressed. Very impressed. And this is just the beginning. I can imagine future versions being absolutely mind-blowing. If I were Adobe, I’d be crapping myself.
As for Adobe, their cold, corporate, money-grabbing practices over the past two decades may finally be coming home to roost. Years of treating their customers like dogshit, squeezing us for every last penny they could scrape out of us. And all along, they relied on the comfortable assumption that they'd got us trapped forever and we’d have nowhere else to go.
Well, perhaps we have now.
You can’t help but think of QuarkXPress. Once the undisputed king of desktop publishing. Still around, but barely a shadow of its former self. A cautionary tale Adobe never bothered to look into: how quickly market dominance can evaporate when a better alternative comes along. Corporate arrogance and shareholder insatiable greed have a price, it would seem.
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Image editing, vector illustration, video, photography, PDFs, motion graphics, page layout, interface design, word processing, audio, presentations, CAD and spreadsheets. Native, open-source apps from the ArtCraft team, built in Rust and free to use.
To install apps:
DOWNLOAD LAUNCHER > open artcraft-launcher.dmg > drag Launcher into your Applications folder > open Launcher > choose the applications you want to install > that’s it.
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