In 2014, Adobe purchased the photo editing platform Aviary and integrated it into is Adobe Creative SDK. Aviary was known to be an easy-to-integrate photo editing tool, which is why so may 3rd party developers embraced the platform and integrated it into their own apps.

A year and a half later, developers are told:

• the old Api Key won’t work anymore
• they need to bloat their apps and include more of the CreativeSDK
• they need to create a new App ID on the My Apps page on CreativeSDK.com
• they must write down the secret token information since they won’t be able to retrieve it after registering their apps

This would be easier to come to terms with, had it not been for the insincere opening statement on the developer site:

We’ve made great efforts to ensure that migrating from the Aviary SDK to the Adobe Creative SDK is as seamless as possible.

Did I mention that end-users may end up needing Creative Cloud accounts before they can use the tools? The Getting Started guide is a herald of the future change: “Authentication is part of every Creative SDK workflow and every action performed requires a logged-in user”.

I do hope to see this change for the better, but I’m not holding my breath.