I’m probably not the first to notice this, but the plugin sections of CC need a lot of love. It makes plugins look like an abandoned Adobe project, and there are many bugs that make it difficult to find the right plugin for me as a user. Here are some observations:
What’s new. When you open Creative Cloud and click on Stock & Marketplace, you’re greeted with a “What’s New” section. Nothing in that section is new. The “newest” plugin was updated a year ago, and some of the others haven’t been updated in 3 years. I know there are new plugins out there, and you even have the asterisk UI to denote recently updated plugins in search results.
Clicking on ‘see more’ shows a page with ‘Exciting Plugins launched this season’ (which season?) and only 12 plugins. Again, all are old.
Editor’s choice. Many of these plugins are 3 years old. Some have been recently updated, but without a date and more information on why these were chosen, it feels like an outdated list from 2021 without selection criteria.
All plugins. If you click on ‘All Plugins’ on the left-hand menu, you see a list of all plugins ranked by ‘most popular’. The 4th result is Pantone Connect, which has a 1.1/5 rating across 3927 ratings. Looks like rating is completely ignored in popularity ranking.
Even worse, there is some evidence based on rating comments that some plugins just aren’t working. Today, each of our plugin updates are manually reviewed, but there should probably also be yearly manual reviews of 3+ year old plugins to ensure they still work, especially with new versions of Photoshop.
Search. For me personally, I am finding that when searching for the name of my plugin (“frames”), there are 8 plugins ranked ahead of mine that have 0 reviews, and on average they haven’t been updated in over 5 years. One hasn’t been updated in 11 years! I wonder if they even still work.
The above is the default ranking, which is “Sort by: Relevance”. You can also sort by Most Popular, Most recent, and Top rated among others. Each of these appear to isolate a single property of the plugin (e.g. keyword relevance, number of downloads/ratings, average rating, and last update date), which isn’t nearly as useful as a combined ranking system (e.g. high-relevance, high-downloads, high rating, recent). Some of these filters, like Most Popular, also seem to have zero relevance threshold. For example, here are the top two results for the “frames” query, sorted by Most Popular. These two results do not have “frames” in their tags, and don’t have the word “frames” anywhere in their description text. Moreover, they don’t seem to have anything to do with the word “frames”. So why are they showing up at all?
Are there any plans to overhaul this section of CC, or to address any of the above? I think it would make a big difference for both active developers and users.
Yes… I wouldn’t say “popular” either. I think if follows “most downloaded”. And without ensh*tification these words could be synonyms.
But Pantone turned its own product into ransomware. But instead of encrypted files you have your colors locked out. And a lot of people chose to pay ransom because it was their best option at that time.
Completely agree. Looking at last modified dates and minimum Photoshop version supported I suspect that a lot of the older ones probably don’t work any more. I know that the only CEP plugin I used to use a lot is no longer functional.
I know it would be a pain for developers to have to set (and update) “latest PS version tested in”, but it would definitely improve the marketplace to remove stuff that is known to be too old to run in the user’s version of PS.
My suggestion was to create a list of oudated addons in Creative Cloud and Adobe Exchange so Adobe could remove or disable them. And I don’t see how that would be a problem.
An Adobe employee opens a link from my document that leads to an obsolete addon. Adobe verifies that the addon is outdate and removes it from the database.
I also see some issues on Adobe Exchange that should have been resolved long ago. But I don’t see the point of writing to either the forum. Because I’ve written to different Adobe Staff on e-mail - they just ignore me and don’t reply.
I have tons of ideas for UXP plugins, but no motivation to create them, as they will disappear in the abyss of outdated and free addons.
Usually if you want be profitable in selling plugins, the great product is not enough. You need even better marketing. …not sure how others but I really don’t like to do a marketing But I know customers who are really good at it and it works for them.
I totally agree with you that marketing is an important thing in plugin distribution. But when you have so many roles: developer, ux-designer, graphic designer, scriptwriter, video-editor and support team, there is no energy left for marketing.
Yes, I realize that’s my problem. But I’m comparing how Adobe Exchange worked before and what it’s become after the 2022 update.
Developers are asking for simple and logical things:
remove outdated plugins
change the rating system
to sell only plugins in the plugins tab, not all existing design assets under the guise of “plugins”.
Buyers with their 1-star reviews of outdated plugins confirm our logical thoughts.
But I know customers who are really good at it and it works for them.