I had been using Adobe XD for about 14 months when Adobe announced it was winding down active development. I had 11 active client projects stored in XD format, a prototype library I had spent roughly 60 hours building, and zero experience with any alternative tool. That announcement landed on a Monday morning and I spent most of that week in a mild panic.
The file migration problem
XD files do not export cleanly into Figma or Sketch. There are third-party plugins that attempt the conversion, but in my experience they dropped about 30 percent of my layer structures and scrambled most of my auto-layout settings. I ended up rebuilding 4 of the 11 projects from scratch because the converted files were too broken to salvage efficiently.
What I changed after that
I now keep all design files in Figma, which stores everything in the cloud with version history going back 30 days on the free plan and indefinitely on paid tiers. More importantly, I export a static PDF snapshot of every major milestone so clients always have a format-agnostic record of approved designs.
The bigger lesson was about tool dependency. Relying entirely on one piece of software without a backup format or export habit is a real operational risk, especially for freelancers who cannot absorb the time cost of sudden migrations. Checking a tool's ownership status and community size before committing to it is now part of how I evaluate software.