Aero is gone, and Adobe did not ship a replacement.
Adobe discontinued Aero on 6 November 2025. Content could be downloaded until 3 December, and after that date .real scenes stopped playing for authors and viewers alike; project data was deleted from Adobe’s servers after 16 December. What you move to depends on which half of Aero you were using — placing 3D in a room, or anchoring a scene to something printed.
Aero did two different jobs. We do one fully, and the other in its simplest form.
A poster, a page, packaging, a card — point the phone at it and the scene plays on it. That is image tracking, and it is what this platform does. The artwork is the marker, so nothing extra gets printed on the design.
Dropping a model onto a floor or a table, with no printed anchor, is world placement. Interart does the simple version as “In the room”: a 3D model, or your artwork as a cut-out, stands at real size on a floor or a wall, opened from a link in the phone’s own AR viewer, with no app. It is placement only, with no taps, triggers or sound. For a scene with behaviors, look at tools built around WebXR or a game engine.
A lot of Aero use was coursework and client mockups rather than shipped campaigns. If nothing is in circulation, you lost a sketchpad, not a deployment — pick on how fast it is to try, not on migration paths.
The part worth not repeating.
Aero’s viewers needed Adobe’s app. When the app went, the experiences went with it — including for people holding a printed piece that still worked perfectly.
| Adobe Aero | Interart | |
|---|---|---|
| How a viewer opened it | The Aero app, from a store | The phone browser they already have — a scanned QR code |
| What happened at shutdown | Scenes stopped for authors and viewers; server data deleted after 16 Dec 2025 | Not a promise anyone can make for you — see the three questions below |
| Anchoring | Image and world placement | Image tracking on printed pieces; placement on a floor or a wall in “In the room” |
| Authoring | Desktop and mobile app, Creative Cloud account | Browser, no install |
| Changing it after printing | Republish the scene, viewers update in the app | Republish; existing codes show the new version on the next scan |
| Cost | Included with Creative Cloud, until it was not | Free — 3 published designs, 100 scans a month, commercial use included |
Before committing to anywhere: the three questions that predict whether a platform outlives your print run. The first one is whether viewing needs their app.
From the assets, not the .real file.
Aero exports are unreadable here — and after December 2025 most people do not have one anyway. This starts from the source files you kept.
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1
Find the artwork and the media
The print file or a straight photo of the printed piece, plus the video, images or 3D you had anchored to it.
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2
Compose it on the artwork
Upload the artwork and drag the layers on, including past its edges if things should float around or behind the piece.
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3
Publish and print the code
One link, one QR code, and a browser as the doorway — no app for anyone to install and nothing that can be delisted from a store.
Open a template, make it yours.
Interart’s AR templates are finished, working designs — open one in the browser editor, swap in your own artwork, and it’s yours. Each one teaches a technique with a built-in guided tour.
No account needed — sign up later and your work comes with you.
Rebuild one and see.
Start from a photo of the printed piece — the first reveal takes minutes.
Questions, answered.
Adobe discontinued Aero on 6 November 2025 across iOS, Android and Creative Cloud desktop. Existing users could open the app and download their content until 3 December 2025, after which .real scenes stopped working for authors and viewers alike. Project data on Adobe’s servers was deleted after 16 December 2025.
No. Adobe said the AR landscape had changed since 2020 and that it was focusing its resources elsewhere. There is no successor product inside Creative Cloud, which is why the question is which independent tool to move to rather than which Adobe one.
Not in any general-purpose tool. .real was Aero’s own scene format and nothing else reads it. What survives is the material you put into it — the artwork, the videos, the 3D models — and a print-anchored scene rebuilds from those in about an afternoon.
Partly. “In the room” places a 3D model, or a picture, at real size on a floor or a wall with no print and no app, in the phone’s own AR viewer (Quick Look on iPhone, Scene Viewer on Android). It is placement only: no taps, triggers or behaviors, no sound, and a video shows as its first frame. If your Aero scenes depended on interaction, look at WebXR-based tools or a game engine instead.
No, and it is the difference that mattered most when Aero closed. Aero played inside Adobe’s app, so removing the app removed the experiences. Here the experience runs in the phone browser that is already on the device: viewers scan the QR code beside the piece and point the camera at it.