Adobe Acrobat and Reader 2015 reach end of support

If you’ve been happily using Adobe Reader 2015 software for the last few years, you’re in for a rude awakening. The software vendor is ending support for these versions of its PDF-perusing product.

Adobe is bringing its support for two related products to an end: its free Acrobat Reader 2015 software, which enables people to open PDF documents without paying anything and perform basic edits, and the commercial Acrobat 2015 software that lets people create, convert, and add security and extra interactivity to their PDFs.

Adobe released both of these products in 2015, with Acrobat DC and Acrobat Reader DC. DC stands for Document Cloud, which is Adobe’s central cloud-based hub for managing documents.

The company’s Support Lifecycle Policy only provides five years of support from the date that its products become generally available. Adobe is pulling support on the products’ fifth anniversary, 7 April 2020.

At that point, customers won’t get technical support for their products, meaning that if you phone Adobe with a problem, its operatives won’t deal with it. More importantly, this end of support means that you won’t get any more security patches for the products either.