Not an April fool! On 1 April Adobe announced that they will discontinue the sale of these licenses through their Transactional License Program (TLP) and Cumulative Licensing Program (CLP). Subscription versions of Acrobat Pro & Std will continue to be available. End of support for Acrobat Pro & Std 2020 will be in June 2025.
End of support does not mean end of life. It means that Adobe will stop releasing security fixes. Your licenses will continue to operate until they become incompatible with changes in your operating system.
The last date for placing orders for Acrobat perpetual license products in TLP and CLP will be July 15, 2024.
There will not be a new version of Acrobat perpetual beyond Acrobat 2020. Customers wanting a desktop-only, non-subscription version of Acrobat will have the option to purchase a term license of Acrobat, called Acrobat Classic, starting on 15 July 2024. Entec will update you when Adobe release more information on this version.
Acrobat Classic will be license providing up to three years of access to Acrobat software and available as a "one-time, non-recurring purchase”. Classic will not include ongoing Acrobat product feature enhancements or access to Adobe Document Cloud services via web browser or mobile devices.
Adobe added that they will be decommissioning serial licensing after this year. Serial licensing is the licensing activation system used by perpetual licenses. They did not elaborate on what "after this year” meant, nor what would happen to the popular Photoshop & Premiere Elements applications.
To some extent we’ve been here before. In 2019/20 when Acrobat 2017 was the current version Adobe kept saying they wouldn’t release a new perpetual license version, then did, releasing Acrobat 2020. Since they introduced subscription licenses (2013/14) they’ve been saying they would discontinue perpetual licensing and we still have that.
