There’s one gaping hole in the Windows Arm app ecosystem

By Luke Larsen Published July 30, 2024

The transition to supporting Windows on Arm has been a huge success this year. Despite previous failed attempts, Microsoft really put its muscle behind getting developers on board this year in support of Copilot+ PCs — and the result has felt like nothing short of a miracle.

Today, you can pick up one of these new Qualcomm-powered Arm devices and not experience the slightest hiccup when loading up nearly all of the apps the average person uses.

There is, however, one significant hole in the ecosystem. And no, I’m not talking about gaming — that remains an issue, but these devices just plainly weren’t designed for games. I’m talking about the Adobe suite — in particular, Premiere Pro.

Adobe has already recompiled many of its popular apps to support Arm, such as Photoshop and Lightroom, though reports indicate that the Photoshop app remains buggy. Other popular apps like Acrobat run in emulation — and do so just fine.

But then there’s the video editing side of the suite. Premiere Pro, After Effects, and Media Encoder are all currently unsupported by Adobe on the Snapdragon X chips. We know this firsthand because we use the Pugetbench Premiere Pro to test PCs, and it wouldn’t even run on the Snapdragon X laptops.

The good news, however, is that Adobe says it’s working on it. The company originally said it would be coming in July, though, so unless the update drops tomorrow, it may be later than promised.

On the plus side, though, Adobe recently brought over the beta version of Illustrator and InDesign to try out. Adobe has been busy introducing new AI features to these applications, so it’s nice to see some love shown to porting them to Arm. The stated goal has always been to launch its entire lineup of apps to support Snapdragon X chips, and the momentum is certainly on its side.

For what it’s worth, many of the other significant holdouts, such as Slack, Google Chrome, and DaVinci Resolve, all run natively on Arm, and it’s likely only a matter of time before Premiere Pro does. How long exactly? Well, that’s the question.