https://www.adobe.com/legal/terms-linkfree.html
Adobe Creative Cloud is effectively the “glue” that provides access and the DRM functions for all of their subscription-based application suite (plus many users and studios rely on Photoshop and Premiere for photos and video). Account creation is free while this suite of desktop/mobile manages the payment flow for subscriptions to the various software applications in Adobe’s “Creative Suite”. In the past, software licenses were “one and done” for a version (there would be upgrade pricing for the next version and so on). I personally have long disliked this business model because of how you are at the whim of these company’s when it comes to them potentially holding your project data “hostage” or giving themselves a license to do whatever it is they want with it.
Creative Cloud has also been notoriously buggy in the past. Since it also does the “phone home” back to Adobe license servers (in order to validate your subscription), it also has methods to disable the software on your computer when it believes that installation is no longer “authenticate” (and people have had their installation messed up during periods where their network connectivity to Adobe’s servers weren’t functioning properly).
Digressing, this updated Terms of Use is as bad as ByteDance’ Terms of Service for CapCut when it comes to what they can do with your user generated content (though there are more controversial issues with CapCut when it comes to siphoning personal information off user devices and violating other privacy laws).
AppleInsider has an article that covers the whole thing in more detail. From my POV, I cannot in good conscience recommend anyone using Adobe software that requires an Adobe Creative Cloud account (which is pretty much all of their software besides stuff like Acrobat).
