Adobe finally, mercifully, kills off Premiere Clip

 

 

In perhaps a relatively quiet admission of their folly, Adobe today announced via email to subscribers that Premiere Clip will be laid to rest on September 17, 2019. When I first picked up Premiere Clip in 2014, I refused to review it as it felt like an incomplete product. It was more of an idea, and I wanted to give Adobe some time to refine it. A year later, when I did review it, I was not happy at all. Clip was an absolute trash fire of an editing app. It was easily the most underpowered editing software I had ever encountered on any platform, and felt heinously misguided either on who it was supposed to be for, or how it went about serving that customer base. 

You couldn't even edit or view videos in landscape mode on your phone, for example. Stuff like that just, to this day, still baffles me. 

Later in 2015 I met with one of the product managers of Clip at Adobe's San Jose headquarters and in a conversation, she agreed that Clip had missed the mark. Though at the time not public, she admitted it was back to the drawing board for the team, as they would have to come up with something better than Clip.

It took several more years, but they did finally make a successor to Clip that at least shows promise: Rush. Rush fixes almost everything that was wrong with Clip, and aside from still being underpowered based on its competition (Luma Fusion is the king here), it's certainly off to a better start than the featureless mess Clip still sits in. 

I say "still" because Clip is technically still available to download and use, nearly five years after it launched and after only one feature update four years ago. Well, it is available to download as of the writing of this article, but on September 17 Adobe is finally taking the old horse out to pasture:

 

 

Goodbye Clip, you will not be missed. Rush is looking like very much a success when compared to what Clip accomplished, but the landscape has changed since Clip launched and consumers expect more from their products. I have been hopeful that Rush can actually realize the consumer demands for a mobile editing platform, and I'm willing to even wait a bit longer. But in order for Rush to avoid the same fate as Clip, it's going to need to get a lot more powerful, a lot quicker than it took Adobe to go from Clip to Rush.