As Windows on Arm continues to gain traction with the launch of Copilot+ PCs powered by Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X series chips, Adobe is finally making a more serious commitment to supporting the platform. The company has just released beta versions of four of its most important creative tools—Premiere Pro, After Effects, Audition, and Media Encoder—optimized to run natively on Arm-based Windows machines. This announcement is a key milestone, especially for video and audio professionals who have long relied on Adobe’s Creative Cloud suite but were unable to transition to Arm hardware due to lack of software support. The Verge reports that these new betas are now available for download, giving early adopters a chance to test them on next-gen Windows laptops.
Despite this progress, the newly available Arm-native apps are far from feature-complete. Premiere Pro’s Arm beta, for example, is missing essential capabilities like support for third-party extensions, ProRes RAW video formats, and hardware-accelerated decoding and encoding for widely used formats such as H.264 and HEVC. The same limitations apply to After Effects, Audition, and Media Encoder, meaning creators should expect a more constrained experience at first. Adobe has committed to closing the feature gap over time, but has not offered specific dates or timelines for when full parity will be achieved. For now, the betas serve more as a signal of intent rather than a full solution for professional workflows.
This development comes years after Adobe first dipped its toes into Windows on Arm by launching a native version of Photoshop, a move that dates back to 2020. Since then, Adobe’s pace in expanding Arm support across the rest of its ecosystem has been glacial—likely influenced by the limited market share of Arm devices and the technical challenges of porting such complex, performance-sensitive software. But with Microsoft now heavily invested in Arm through its Copilot+ initiative, and Qualcomm’s latest chips offering genuine x86-competitive performance and AI acceleration, the pressure has grown for Adobe and other major software developers to follow through.
For users, especially those considering a switch to Arm-based laptops for their energy efficiency and longer battery life, Adobe’s latest move is a cautiously optimistic development. While it’s not yet possible to fully replace an x86-based editing setup, these betas offer a glimpse at what’s coming—and help validate Microsoft’s vision for Arm as a mainstream Windows platform. In the long run, whether Arm becomes a true rival to traditional Intel and AMD systems in creative work will depend not just on hardware improvements, but also on how quickly software vendors can close the performance and compatibility gap. Adobe’s expanded beta support is a critical step in that direction, even if the road ahead still looks long.