Hi Creative Cloud Member,
Thank you for using Adobe XD. We want to make you aware that certain features will become Premium features in April 2020 and will no longer be fully available in the Adobe XD Starter plan. Beginning this week you will see a Premium tag added to the following features in XD:
Share Links
Invite to Document
Saving to Your Computer (though you will still be able to save to cloud, work offline, and download a copy of your file)
Full access to these features will only be available through a paid plan for XD in April 2020.
We’re updating each plan to better meet the needs of our users. All design and prototyping features continue to remain available to XD users, including Starter. For professional use where collaboration is required, full access to premium features is only available in paid plans. For more details on this update please see here.
What’s not changing is our commitment to listening to our community and delivering on-going feature updates to XD.
Sincerely,
The Adobe XD Team
Are we developers also required to subscribe a paid plan?
No; developers are not required to subscribe to a paid plan. You can remain on the Starter plan and use and develop plugins, including those that import from and export to local storage.
What’s different is that your XD documents must be in the cloud when they’re being worked on. Sharing features are also premium features, and so if you need to test your plugin against those features, that’ll need a Creative Cloud subscription that includes XD.
Just out of curiosity: Will developers experience these things (i.e.: do the cloud document APIs in the cloud module throw in such cases or anything like that)?
The APIs will function normally, and are read-only, so there’s no risk to using them. Where the difficulty would arise is in testing your code that uses those APIs, since you wouldn’t be able to create new links. (Documents with existing links before April will still have those links after April (viewable), so might be worth creating a document with a lot of sharing links now…)
Somewhat related, I have example XD projects for my plugins that show plugin features and examples. IIUC There is no way to open XD project from within the plugin or plugin project directory.
I didn’t think of it till now but plugins could share documents via the cloud but now that sounds like it will be a premium feature.
What do you think if plugins authors being able to create and share example projects from the cloud? That would help distributing examples, opening XD projects from plugins (clicking a share link in the plugin), help in versioning since examples could always be updated by the plugin author. I wouldn’t want users to modify the original but they could learn and save as a new document. Does this make sense?
Use Case:
John is a plugin author who has created example projects for his users. He puts the examples on his site but updates or adds to them regularly. He has recently, started created examples and saves them to the cloud. Then he gets a share link and puts that link in his plugin dialog. His users then click on the link in the plugin dialog and the example is opened in XD in a new session window.
No news at the moment about when there will be out-of-the-box support for monetization.
However, to avoid any misunderstanding for others reading along, developers are already allowed to monetize, and there are a number of examples already shipping today. The caveat is that this requires the developer to build their own solution for monetizing, which we understand is a hurdle.
This will give you an .xd file that you can share with users of your plugin, e.g. by posting it for download from your plugin’s website. (Users on the free Starter Plan will be able to open the file too – just if they want to modify it and save changes, they’ll need to Save As a cloud document).