The all-new Affinity is available today for Mac and Windows, with iPad coming soon.
Source: Canva
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All the v2 versions are on iPad, have been since v1. Feature parity with the desktop versions too, interfaces are of course a little different. I have full confidence the current v3 will soon be on iPad too. Utill then, v2 versions are plenty powerful.
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Their business approach is somehow like Obsidian, in which without pay I can enjoy full features including sync. By increasing the number of users, more users will need some paid services like the built-in sync and publishing.
And I like Affinity CEO is still here (he was on another video showcasing v3), not fully replaced by Canva.
The opposite approach is Bending Spoon: laying off almost all previous staff and CEO, cropping free versions and pushing up prices. I only hear the ongoing news of development on Evernote, among many apps they have bought.
Although no one knows what will happen next, Affinity has its potential now especially when Adobe is getting more greedy. At least indie artists, illustrators, zine publishers, some freelancers and small companies will head towards Affinity instead of Adobe: Adobe’s price is too high and TOS is too harsh (e.g. cancellation fee).
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When I posted about trolling my desktop for AI, I didn’t mean that as snarky as it probably read. Every advertising billboard you see is trolling for customers.
My remaining doubts about Canva come from the way they cut off users for the month of October. My choice would have been to say creative freedom comes on the 30th and on top of that, Affinity V2 is free, too.
That would have created hype and a rush to grab Affinity V2 lest the 30th bring bad news.
In the meantime, there’s a vast unaddressed market a dedicated marketeer could really leverage.
I speak of homeopathic remedies for stress-onset incontinence. There’s a whole C-suite full of execs at Adobe in need of relief now that Affinity is free. There’s no cure for what ails them, of course, so homeopathy is firmly indicated.
Because therapy that cures nothing has got to be great for maladies with no cure!
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Going back to basics, pay once apparently wasn’t sustainable in the long run. So… all things must change?
That was my understanding, though I never actually tested only installing Publisher. But I think my point stands - there was one app that did all three things. Maybe it had some different install requirements, and it definitely had some different license requirements. But the “Persona” selection in “Affinity” is a direct descendant of the one in Publisher.
Meanwhile… I’m off to use my new app that is both free and I also helpd pay for (most of the development of it). You’re welcome, newcomers.
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You choose to believe whatever you want, of course. My experience of corporate takeover never ended well for any product I liked and used (ZBrush, Substance Painter, Autodesk Fusion (T-splines add-on) hell, even Photomator and Pixelmator so far), and they sure as heck weren’t thinking about your best interests when making it “free”, but rather to yank a few adobe users and try to disrupt their dominance.
I wouldn’t mind to be proven wrong, time will tell. Short of using open source alternatives something like this is bound to eventually happen to any decent proprietary software.
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We can choose what to believe, but, for example, none of the “never ended well” apps you mentioned are ones I have ever heard of, so my experience is completely outside of yours. In other words, neither of us know the full story of what has happened.
Now… I have heard of Photomator and Pixelmator, but your assertion that it “hasn’t ended well… so far” is part of the problem I’m calling out here. Nothing has changed yet. And here we are saying bad things have happened. They haven’t. Some people just expect them to happen.
We should, I believe, stick to “that sucked” and steer clear of “this will suck” when we don’t actually know what will happen.
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I am not convinced this shares the usual risks of “free” software. After all - Adobe rose to its current prominence by offering a free Adobe Reader. Indeed Adobe still offers that.
Adobe realized early on that to become a de facto standard, there had to be a universal free way for anyone to read pdf documents. The built an empire charging money for Adobe Acrobat Pro and other advanced offerings - but there was always a free Adobe Reader in order to share documents with the world.
It seems to me Affinity is now doing the same thing - hoping .afphoto, .afdesign, and .afpub similarly take hold as a universal format to share. In order to do so the basic Affinity app must be free.
At the same time, Affinity realizes that there is likely to be a major market of users willing to pay for AI features to make the creative process quicker/easier/faster/better. So they are betting that making non-AI Affinity free will create income by converting customers to paid AI users.
If this plan works it could be a win-win for everybody except Adobe. If it prompts Adobe to rethink their pricing/marketing strategy that could be a terrific example of the free market in action.