Adobe’s Open Developer Platform Principles
Adobe is committed to being a truly open developer platform. We want to make it possible to build integrations that help users collaborate better and create custom workflows. With the Creative Cloud developer platform, we laid the foundation for an incredible extensibility ecosystem that puts user and developer innovation, creativity, and safety front and center.
Now, we have the opportunity to double down with Adobe Express. We’re taking a principled approach that will guide our decision-making as we build and evolve the Adobe Express developer platform. Our goal is simple — to extend Adobe Express’ functionality as an all-in-one creative solution, and unlock new capabilities so Express users benefit from the innovation of our developer community.
This approach centers around four key principles:
1. User Choice: We will embrace user choice and allow add-ons that may overlap with Adobe-built features and/or product offerings, leaving it up to our customers and end users to choose the best solution for their unique needs.
The first batch of add-ons for Adobe Express focuses on importing and exporting content, so users can choose their preferred ways to get started with content and share their final design. Storage connector add-ons for Dropbox and OneDrive enable users to quickly add existing assets straight into their Adobe Express files. When they’re finished, they can easily upload their design and save it back to their storage provider. Asset providers like Free Stock Search and Auto Icon let users choose from millions of freely available photos, icons, and illustrations, while additional add-ons like Spacefill empower users to generate their own customized backgrounds, patterns, and images.
2. Developer Innovation: We are aiming to enable robust APIs and a rich set of UI surfaces that will allow us to attract and harness the collective power of a diverse developer community to unlock new product capabilities for our users.
One of the most eye-catching add-ons we currently have available on the Adobe Express add-on marketplace is Attention Insight, an AI-powered heatmap that instantly shows you what users are likely to notice first in an Adobe Express design. This helps maximize impact when designing, and highlights any distracting elements.
3. Safety, Security, and Stability: We have a duty to protect our users and have architected our developer platform with end-user security, safety, and stability in mind. Add-ons for Adobe Express are sandboxed from the core application, and APIs are designed to prevent exposure of sensitive information without explicit user consent. Plus, add-ons on the Adobe Express marketplace get automatically updated whenever the developer updates the add-on, and the update gets approved by Adobe.
At the heart of our design is a smooth in-app developer experience that feels as easy and friendly as Adobe Express itself. This integrated experience includes:
- Developer tooling directly inside Adobe Express to meet developers where they are when testing and sharing add-ons (instead of having many tabs open between different tools)
- Private sharing experience to test and share their add-on with others for review and testing, or for internal use only
- An integrated submission surface that makes it easy to preview, submit, and manage your add-ons in the marketplace
4. UX Defaults: We’ll be creating a happy path for developers to leverage existing Adobe patterns, provide access to Adobe’s Spectrum Web Components, and an evolving collection of UI patterns and code samples in our developer tools and documentation.
Our new UX guidelines will help developers understand Adobe Express users and their specific needs, while also providing UX best practices. The guidelines cover how to use Spectrum Web Components so add-ons appear more cohesive with the Adobe Express product experience.
Our commitment to an open development approach has resulted in a thriving Creative Cloud developer ecosystem. We have over 1,600 plugins and integrations, plus countless additional enterprise plugins, scripts, and C++ plugins or presets created for Photoshop, Lightroom, and our DVA apps. We’re looking forward to continuing this open approach with our Adobe Express developer community and enabling users to benefit from the creative innovation of developers.
Come build with us
Our principled approach will continue to encourage and inspire our developer community to build whatever they can dream up — unlocking new product value and new use cases and innovating in ways we couldn’t have anticipated.
This is at the heart of Adobe’s commitment to democratizing creativity, and we’re looking forward to seeing how our Open Developer Platform Principles will influence the creation of more thoughtful add-ons for Adobe Express.
Ready to start building add-ons for Adobe Express? We’re currently accepting a new cohort of developers, so fill out this sign-up form to get early access to the developer beta.
