Adobe Express Platform Updates for MAX 2024: New Developer Capabilities and Explosive Growth of Our Partner Ecosystem | by Aubrey Cattell | Oct, 2024

Discover the latest in API capabilities, developer tools, and support for mobile add-ons.

Ever since we opened up the Adobe Express platform to developers, our thriving partner ecosystem has seen exponential growth. Adobe Express is now a powerful modular and extensible platform, featuring a wide range of mission-critical integrations in our partners’ applications and over 150 add-ons in Express itself. The result is that we’re empowering users to work wherever and however they want — easier, better, and faster.

We have natively embedded Adobe Express into other apps across the wider Adobe ecosystem and partnered with global industry leaders to seamlessly integrate Adobe Express with their platforms. The number of apps in the Adobe Express add-on marketplace, meanwhile, has nearly quadrupled since last year.

Our Creative Cloud Developer Platform team is back at Adobe MAX, and we’re looking forward to engaging with our vibrant developer community face-to-face and online over the next few days. Let’s update you on how the Adobe Express partner ecosystem has evolved over the last year and what’s in the pipeline for developers like you.

The Adobe Express Embed SDK enables partners to embed Adobe Express editing and AI capabilities into their own web app or website.

You can choose to embed the full Adobe Express editor or streamlined, contextual tools — optimized for simpler, more intuitive, and more targeted workflows — that are revealed at the right time for specific tasks.

Quick Actions, for example, provides users with powerful one-click tools to edit images, videos, and documents quickly. Adobe Firefly-powered AI Modules like Generate Image and Edit Image, meanwhile, let you embed contained mini-editing experiences that focus on what your users need when they need it. These prebuilt editing and generation modules save valuable development time, and you can integrate with the Embed SDK within a few weeks rather than months. Check out our updated documentation, including a new quick-start guide, tutorials, and more.

Here’s an overview of some of the integrations that are currently available:

We’ve natively integrated Adobe Express in other apps across the wider Adobe ecosystem and are continually enhancing it to provide a seamless experience for our customers, so they don’t need to leave the environment they’re already in:

• Acrobat: Create standout documents by using Adobe Express’s design capabilities directly within Acrobat, making document creation more dynamic and visually appealing.
• Bridge: Bridge users can now use Adobe Express Quick Actions to effortlessly perform popular image and video edits in just a few clicks.
• Creative Cloud Desktop: The integration now also includes Adobe Express’s AI-powered Generate Image and Edit Image modules.

We’re also collaborating with industry leaders to reach business users where they already work and where we know they will benefit from Adobe Express’s capabilities so they can be even more creative and productive.

• Slack: Teams can enhance their creativity with Generate Image and access thousands of professionally designed templates right inside Slack.
• Webflow: Create and edit high-quality images and visual assets for your website with the Generate and Edit Image modules embedded directly in the Webflow editor.
• HubSpot: Access Adobe Express’s Edit Image module directly from your HubSpot workflow and create, manage, and enhance eye-catching visual content.
• Box: 115K+ enterprise customers can access Adobe Express’s powerful suite of creative tools as their default image editor. Now in public beta.
• Miro (coming soon): Turn concepts into visuals and execute on campaign plans using Adobe Express integrated into Miro, fostering cross-functional collaboration and creative iteration.
• EA Sports (coming soon): Players can generate and customize images, like team logos, for a personalized gaming experience in Team Builder for EA SPORTS College Football 25.

The growth of the Adobe Express add-on marketplace has been staggering. Within the course of just one year, the number of add-ons available to extend the functionality of Adobe Express has nearly quadrupled to more than 150 and counting!

Notable recent additions to the marketplace that enhance expressiveness, accelerate workflows with AI, and promote inclusivity include TikTok Symphony Assistant, Cube GPT, and Color Blindness Simulator.

With the AI-powered Adobe Express add-on for TikTok, users can ideate, create, and optimize stand-out TikTok content as well as quickly tap into TikTok’s Commercial Music Library and access over a million songs and sounds — all within one platform.

You can even get funding from us to build an Adobe Express add-on: the Adobe Fund For Design supports developers (or tech-savvy designers!) who push the boundaries of what’s possible on our open Adobe Express platform. To find out more about what we’re looking for and how to get your creative add-on idea backed, check out this blog post.

Now let’s take a look at what we have been working on to improve the developer experience further and give you more tools to boost the productivity of millions of Adobe Express users.

We’re also excited to announce the availability of several new add-on capabilities that you can use in your add-ons. These new capabilities will allow you to build even more powerful add-ons for your users.

Note: These new capabilities are available today but some are experimental APIs and will be updated to stable after Adobe MAX. Please provide your feedback in our Discord channel!

New capabilities when adding content:

New experimental text editing capabilities:

• Initial support for the Text Flow feature has been added which allows your add-on to work with text that flows across multiple text nodes. Important: This feature also comes with our first deprecation of a stable API. Read the documentation for more information.
• Apply character styles to ranges of text. You can change the size, color, spacing, or font for a given range of characters. You can also control whether text is underlined. And the API also ensures that your add-on follows the same editing permissions when it comes to user-uploaded fonts. (Experimental)

Unlock editing of content added by your add-ons:

• Remember settings used to create content by saving the user’s parameters inside the document… right on the same elements created by your add-on! Now your users no longer need to delete and recreate content in your add-on. It can preserve the configuration for your users and replace it for them. (Experimental)
• Now you can receive notifications when the user’s selection changes. This means your add-on’s user interface can update to reflect the user’s new selection, which allows your add-on to feel more responsive to the user’s actions. (Experimental)
• Replace images inline while preserving other important user settings (such as crop and rotation).
• Additional support for Grid layouts has been added. Add-ons can now replace content in grid nodes and inspect the cells in a grid.
• Together these APIs unlock add-ons that can offer property-editing experiences while empowering users to return to your add-on and edit content they’ve already added.

Be sure to read the changelog in the documentation to get all the details on the new capabilities outlined above.

And there’s more! Also check out the following improvements to the Adobe Express developer platform to get the most out of it:

• Enterprise distribution: Developers can submit add-ons for internal-only distribution, meaning the add-on is published just to users within their organization. Developers must either have an Administrator role or Developer role to publish their add-on internally.
• In-app code playground: Last month we introduced a new in-app code playground to help developers get started and experiment with add-on APIs directly inside Adobe Express.
• New third-party developer tool: Check out Bolt Express, a lightning-fast boilerplate for Adobe Express from Hyper Brew that makes it super easy to build add-ons using React, Svelte, or Vue. Also available for UXP and CEP.
• Marketplace improvements: We’re revamping the Adobe Express add-on marketplace experience with new use-case driven add-on categories and collections, along with improved search and filter functionalities to make discovering new add-ons easier and more intuitive than ever.
• Improved design guidelines: We’ve recently updated our design guidelines for add-ons to be more comprehensive and easier to consume. Check them out in the add-on documentation today!

We’ve also started rolling out support for add-ons on mobile devices! The private developer beta will give you early access to documentation and resources to enable mobile functionality for your add-on. Request access now! We’ll be adding developers over time as we expand the capabilities of mobile add-ons.

You can already find Google Drive, Google Photos, Microsoft OneDrive, and Dropbox in the mobile version of Adobe Express on iPhone and Android devices.

Add and invoke these add-ons from two locations:

• In the editor, click the “+” icon to add new content, then click “Your Stuff”. Once you maximize the panel, you’ll see the add-ons at the bottom of the panel. Click on one to get started!
• In the editor, click the share icon to export content back to your preferred storage provider. Just tap the icon in the share sheet to get started.

We’ve also been working with some partners to release the very first audio-based add-ons to mobile devices in time for Adobe MAX! Check the “Audio” tab of the “Media” menu to get access to add-ons that allow you to add generated voiceovers and music to your Adobe Express designs. Try Juice BGM to access high-quality, copyright-free music to match the genre, mood, and theme of your project.

“We built our app using the SDK and were impressed with the comprehensive documentation and the wide range of components available in the library,” said Anshul Mehta, developer of the Voiceover add-on. “Integration was fairly easy, and the support team was prompt and helpful throughout the process.”

The reach of our growing Adobe Express ecosystem is continually expanding. We’re adding powerful integrations, built in collaboration with industry leaders, all the time to empower enterprise users in businesses of any size to create content efficiently on their preferred platforms.

The modular and extensible nature of Adobe Express ensures that the app evolves alongside the needs of users. And so we’re working hard to enhance the developer experience as well and give you the right tools you need to build versatile integrations and add-ons for the platform — and to do so faster and more efficiently. That’s where you come in: Your input is essential in shaping the future of our partner ecosystem.

Whether you are extending Adobe Express with add-ons or integrating Adobe Express into your website using the Embed SDK, we want to hear from you. Try out the latest features and let us know what you think:

Visit our developer site to learn more about building integrations and add-ons for Adobe Express.