Adobe has dominated the visual design software field for decades, but in recent years they missed the boat for UI/UX design and I would say that Sketch and Figma dominate 'mindshare' among designers for app design. Although Adobe XD doesn't share the same 'mindshare', the dominance of Adobe in the industry means that there is still interest in the product.
Will this Adobe XD update broaden the usage of the app? Only time will tell. It's nice to see alternatives to Adobe apps though.
It does appear that Adobe is in the unusual position of playing catch-up in this field for once. (Another example of Adobe catching-up is on the iPad where Procreate has leapt over Adobe to dominate the digital painting app space.)
The dilemma is that they wont't make XD maximally useful as a standalone tool because it then eats into their other offerings like Illustrator or Photoshop.
Figma for example is a more complete solution if that's the only design tool you gonna use, it has a good pen tool and even blend modes for images.
XD shines when used together with their other apps. Figma isn't much cheaper than a CC subscription when you also add services/tools for commercial fonts, mockups, video, stock graphics and 3D on top.
"The dilemma is that they wont't make XD maximally useful as a standalone tool because it then eats into their other offerings like Illustrator or Photoshop."
I can certainly believe this. For a long time, Illustrator only had the option to create a single artboard (page). I'm convinced it was partly due to the overlap with InDesign. If you wanted to create a short document or leaflet, Illustrator would be fine for the purpose - but obviously not if you could only export a single page. Users were clamouring for multiple pages/artboards and Adobe finally introduced the feature in Illustrator CS4 in 2008. (There were over 12 versions of Illustrator prior to this.)
Will this Adobe XD update broaden the usage of the app? Only time will tell. It's nice to see alternatives to Adobe apps though.
It does appear that Adobe is in the unusual position of playing catch-up in this field for once. (Another example of Adobe catching-up is on the iPad where Procreate has leapt over Adobe to dominate the digital painting app space.)