Salesforce is retiring its Lightning Adoption apps this month as nearly all orgs have now transitioned to using the Lightning Experience.
Lightning Experience applications, including Transition Assistant, Configuration Converter, and Experience Readiness Check, will no longer be usable after January 10, the company said in a Salesforce Knowledge article.
Classic vs. Lightning
The cloud giant had created Lightning Adoption apps to support org migrations from Salesforce Classic to Lightning Experience, which they have been enhancing and investing in over the past few years. The most recent example is the refreshed Lightning UI, made available in mid-2024.
But the Lightning Experience had been adopted by 98.1% of all Salesforce orgs, the company has revealed.
“We’ve observed a significant drop in the usage of Lightning Adoption apps”, a spokesman said in a statement.
The company now recommends running the Salesforce Optimizer app as an alternative to the Lightning Adoption products. The Salesforce Optimizer takes a snapshot of your org and looks for potential problems in implementation, helping admins declutter.
Salesforce Lightning was announced in 2015, and the company has been gradually phasing out their development efforts and customer support for Salesforce Classic ever since. Customers had originally taken a while to transition, in part due to Lightning not being on par with the tried-and-tested Classic initially, with functionality gaps between the two.
Alongside an enhanced interface, Lightning also encompasses the Lightning Design System (HTML framework for building components) and the Salesforce Lightning App Builder (declarative app building and Lightning interface customization).
Salesforce Classic had served users for more than a decade, but according to Salesforce’s statement, almost every org is now using Lightning. We have asked Salesforce if the 98.1% includes orgs using both Lightning and Classic, as it certainly seems a very high figure.
After the release of the newer version, Salesforce customers were given the task of migrating to Lightning by running the Lightning Readiness Assessment. The difficulty of migration varied between customers, who had to become familiar with a whole new experience, re-enable users, update documentation, and tackle a number of tedious tasks. Those with a large amount of custom code and Visualforce pages had found themselves bogged down and unable to switch.
Other reasons for resisting the change included performance issues – like page loading times – and functionality gaps. The Lightning Experience had aimed to change the way Salesforce looked through a browser, while also streamlining the look and feel across Salesforce no matter what type of device you were using. We can also see enhancements in this direction continuing with the mobile application getting a long-awaited update.
For a while, there were some features only available in Classic, but that issue has now largely been resolved.
Final Thoughts
Across the tech sector, it’s not uncommon to see people holding out with ‘classic’ products for a while, even amid newer, shinier versions being released.
There can sometimes be a perception with newer products that they’re not entirely ‘finished’ when they are released. Effectively, the first iteration is something of an extended beta test, with the ‘proper’ version becoming available following a large update to patch up the rough edges.
But after ten years of Lightning and – at least according to Salesforce – nearly universal adoption of the newer Experience, it may be curtains for the few remaining Classic holdouts, as this move by Salesforce may spook them into finally making the transition to the Lightning Experience.
There may come a day when Salesforce forces the switch, and it might come sooner than we think.
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