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Devastated about this. Good for them for making money on the sale to Canva, but still, this is a sad day. Studio is now freemium, in the future probably more an
by mns 11mo ago
Devastated about this. Good for them for making money on the sale to Canva, but still, this is a sad day. Studio is now freemium, in the future probably more and more features (outside of AI) will be added in the subscription, and you will end up with an app full of disabled features and pop-ups encouraging you to subscribe and unlock the new and shiny thing.
There is absolutely nothing in the world that anyone can say to convince me that this is not the end for Affinity. Every single product that went through this ended up being an ad data gathering subscription pushing unusable app for anything useful.
I have both a V1 and V2 license. V2 is probably now useless considering that it will never get any updates. This marks the death of one of the last popular pay once and use forever apps (in the sense that a V3 with new features will never exist).
- t-writescode 11mo ago[flagged]
- mns 11mo agoAny type of updates (bugs, security, OS support) will go only to the Canva version, no part of my comment was about the new hotness or that being the reason I bought any of the licenses.
- t-writescode 11mo agoI admit I’m not that worried about a virus or exploit in a jpeg that specifically targets the less-popular image editing application, when I have a solid virus scanner. And I’ll be switching to Proton for this soon enough, so OS support stops mattering for the most part. And most bugs you just work around when they’re in a large and stable enough product like Affinity Photo
- slig 11mo ago>It’ll keep working for decades to come because you own the software Only if you don't update the OS and/or the drivers.
- BrouteMinou 11mo agoThe FOMO created by online games. You need the latest DLC to get the latest armour you know...
- latexr 11mo ago> It’ll keep working for decades to come “Decades” is probably a stretch. Especially on macOS, updates to the OS may eventually break them. And the apps were removed from the App Store.
- carlosjobim 11mo agoIf you are dependent on certain software you don't upgrade your OS until you are 100% sure that the software will continue to work. Especially money-making software like pro photo editing tools. If needed, you keep old machines around especially for that software.
- timeon 11mo agoThis is the reason I kept 32bit mbp/macos around in order to use old pre-CCloud Adobe. Then I've found Affinity and was able to move on... Should have started already with Inkscape at that time I guess.
- TeMPOraL 11mo agoAh, the good ol' "run it on Windows 95 in a VM" approach. It's pretty common in industrial applications and adjacent small businesses, which often rely on decades old software that has no modern alternative, or (more often) suffered from extensive enshittification. You keep running the software on old hardware, and once you run out of options for old hardware, you virtualize it and continue indefinitely. Of course, this is only workable if you can live with using your program through a special machine that's dedicated only to it, and/or are willing to pay the price of increasingly sophisticated hacks needed to integrate it to the rest of your workflow, because the security world never sleeps and keeps inventing ways to break things that used to work perfectly fine.
- aleph_minus_one 11mo agoHistorically, Windows versions had excellent backwards compatibility, so at least in the past, this was much less of a problem in the Windows world than in the macOS world. This is also the reason why so many Windows users are so angry that in particular since Windows 10 (but partly already in previous Windows versions) Microsoft made it so hard to have some "stable" Windows version on a computer that only gets security updates. Similarly for the forced Windows 11 upgrade where Windows 11 (officially) does not even work on many computers that Windows 10 supported.
- sedivy94 11mo agoThe Affinity apps are great but there are some critical missing features that have been on the back burner for years. Most impactful example that comes to mind is the vector blend tool. You can take, say, a circle and create step-wise transformations to another shape like a square.This is found in Illustrator and a few others, but absent from Affinity Designer.[0] I share the concern that a new feature like this will be paywalled. Additionally, Serif was very transparent with detailed changelogs and a community to submit bug reports and request new features. I have doubts that Canva will do the same. [0] https://helpx.adobe.com/illustrator/using/tool-techniques/blend-tool.html https://helpx.adobe.com/illustrator/using/tool-techniques/bl...
- t-writescode 11mo agoI primarily use Affinity Photo, not Designer, so my knowledge of what a vector art tool should be able to do is quite limited, so I can’t speak to that.
- pndy 11mo agoMy friend was using Photoshop 7 up until she couldn't install it for whatever reason under W10. It was always enough for her to do what she was doing with her digitalized drawings. Not sure if she found a replacement but she certainly didn't want to use GIMP - interface was way too convoluted and layers management weird, according to her IIRC.
- inanutshellus 11mo agoLearning GIMP as a PS user is like changing operating systems. ... but it has always been worth it for any normal person, IMO. That said... PS's new AI tools might make GIMP no longer a viable option even for normies like me.
- archerx 11mo agoLearning GIMP is not worth it for anyone, people should use the much better and actually usable open source alternative called “Krita”.
- inanutshellus 11mo agoMaybe other apps are better, but my guess is that they just work harder at copying PhotoShop's UX whilst GIMP actively worked to innovate. Remember too that PhotoShop itself is unintuitive and hard to learn. That unintuitiveness is a mark of honor for Photoshop ("ooo, it's so powerful you have to take _classes_ to learn it!") and a mark of shame for GIMP ("ooo, those twits didn't clone PhotoShop, the fools! It's so hard to learn!")
- archerx 11mo agoWell GIMP innovated in the wrong way, you can put the steering wheel in the backseat of a car in the name of innovation but that doesn’t make it better. I honestly would rather use JavaScript and canvas over GIMP because it’s just more intuitive.
- qingcharles 11mo agoYou don't need the new features, but they sure do help. The AI features in Photoshop easily cut my editing time in half. Doing denoise, color grading, object selections, object removals. Like magic.
- GuinansEyebrows 11mo agoI hate to say it but some of the newer PS features have become indispensable in my usage - mainly smart objects. nondestructive layer effects are a godsend when you want to tweak and retweak stuff that would otherwise require a ton of time and effort to undo/redo or duplicate layers/groups to A/B changes.
- t-writescode 11mo agoNondestructive changes, in Affinity, Photoshop and Substance Painter are all amazing, yeah. They also exist on all 3 of those software :) In Affinity, they’re adjustment / live adjustment layers, and support masks.
- GuinansEyebrows 11mo agoPhotoshop has that (adjustment layers in adobe world) but smart objects lets you use any layer effect non destructively, not just the predefined adjustment layers (which also apply downward by default, not just as a per-layer thing). It’s like a layer group on steroids. Pretty hard for me to live without now or id just have an intel hackintosh running CS5/CS6 :)
- kilpikaarna 11mo agoSmart objects and smart filters were present in early CS versions I think. CS5/CS6 had them for sure, though I don't doubt that new filters and features have been added in CC.
- archerx 11mo ago
- miladyincontrol 11mo agoRaw formats arent going away but new cameras and lenses do keep coming out which at minimum need correction profiles. Also the DNG spec does continue to be iterated on, not that users will be forced into the latest features like jpeg-xl compression, but some of the changes can be very breaking to older apps.
- t-writescode 11mo agoVery true, this is an area that could have a major miss. Thankfully, I believe most camera companies have a RAW to JPEG converter with some basic level of UX. “Is it good enough” is a very real question where the answer is probably “No.”
- microtonal 11mo agoI haven't checked, do they use Apple's RAW library on macOS? If so, at least support might evolve with macOS updates for the time being.
- shrinks99 11mo agoSerif (I guess Canva now) maintains their own which uses the Lensfun database.
- SulphurCrested 11mo agoThe Photo (v2) app gives you a choice of using Apple’s converters or “Serif” converters. But, when last I looked, lens corrections were not available with the Apple converters.
- starkparker 11mo agoEspecially with v2's lack of real plugin or scripting options, and with no cross-version interchange format like IDML or apparently even partial backward-compatiblity support in v3, it's also less possible to drag v2 even slightly forward than it was with Adobe CS4/5. If you're a freelancer using v2 and someone gives you v3 files, you can't work.
- HumanOstrich 11mo ago
- pikewood 11mo agoThere's already precedence for app deterioration in their iOS apps. Affinity Photo V1 for iPad lost a lot of functionality in brushes and other features with later versions of iOS (e.g.: https://www.reddit.com/r/AffinityPhoto/comments/1725daf/what_is_wrong_with_my_brushes/ https://www.reddit.com/r/AffinityPhoto/comments/1725daf/what...) It was never updated.
- tomhow 11mo ago> My guy Please omit patronising barbs like this from comments on HN.
- JKCalhoun 11mo agoYeah, I've been using Affinity apps since they appeared. Paid up for the 2.0 versions when they launched. I didn't know if I would need Publisher but bought it too simply because I liked the company (and in fact use it all the time now). Nothing is broken with their apps or sales model. There was nothing to "fix" there.
- blackqueeriroh 11mo agoThey seemed to disagree with you.
- _cenw 11mo agoThey being Canva. I can't imagine most people who worked on Affinity are thrilled about this either.
- grishka 11mo agoFor personal use, piracy is always an option.
- timeon 11mo agoHow does that work with SaaS?
- rapfaria 11mo agotimeon_affinity_001@gmail.com
- TeMPOraL 11mo agoYou have to board a container ship hauling containers full of modern smartphones, capable of passing remote attestation so you can work with passkeys and app push notification based auth and whatever other bullshit "security" measures get popular in the next decade. Then you have to find out when some C-suite from the SaaS of interest goes on a cruise, board that ship, and extort lifetime accounts hard-wired to charge some cost center inside of the SaaS. Then you can sell those accounts along with the phones as something resembling "pay once use forever" box software. Nobody said sailing the high seas in the 21st century is easy.
- grishka 11mo agoIt doesn't. But Affinity Studio works locally (I assume no one needs the AI features).
- donmcronald 11mo agoI've been thinking about this lately. It's really difficult to understand where your dependencies are with modern software. I might built myself a full blown piracy machine that never gets to access the internet so I have access to an environment that can't get taken away. At the very least, it'll be a good way to learn how much dependence there is on internet connectivity, which we all know the answer to - way too much.
- fumeux_fume 11mo agoI feel similarly and I hope you're wrong about the enshitification of Affinity, but experience tells me it's where you end up when you start walking down the freemium path. Even if the current leadership at Canva means well, all it takes is a financial squeeze or change in leadership and that all goes out the window.
- bigbuppo 11mo agoYep, this is the first step of enshittification. It's all downhill from here. It will probably be ad-supported by this time next year.
- spiderice 11mo ago> It will probably be ad-supported by this time next year It already is. It's an ad for Canva Premium. I know you mean something different than that. But it literally already only exists to push people to pay for Canva. And they will only get more aggressive with that.
- pmkary 11mo agoI was so in love with the idea of "purchase and own for life" I thought every now and then I will buy the license and have a piece of mind. What started after SaaS is now at its closing days to have fully ruined software and from now on there will be hell like we have never seen before. Free Software is dead, Indie software as we used to is dead, and great businesses like Serif are down the road of being dead. I'm so sad.
- renewiltord 11mo agoI mean, what’s the problem? You wanted a pay once use forever and you got that with v2. So keep using v2. No one is going to charge your credit card.
- Espressosaurus 11mo agoI paid for v1 and v2, and would have happily paid for v3. The reason I’m not using Adobe is to avoid their onerous subscription. If Affinity has moved to a subscription model then why bother not using the incumbent?
- karel-3d 11mo agoI think the price points will be different.
- renewiltord 11mo agoOkay so you wanted a different kind of subscription (based on major versions). That’s different from the guy I’m replying to who wants to Buy Software And Just Use It. He can do that with v2. Never needs to pay a penny again.
- Espressosaurus 11mo agoNo, I still want the option of sticking with the old version if I decide that I'm done for now and for it to continue working. I want to own my software, not rent it.
- carlosjobim 11mo ago> V2 is probably now useless considering that it will never get any updates. What are you talking about? I plan to use it for at least 5-10 years more. Excellent software that takes care of all my needs. Melanie Perkins is not going to visit you in your house and force you to uninstall it.
- nirava 11mo agosure. however, it will begin to feel "second class" after some os updates, some chip updates and other goings-on in the software world. still fine, really. I've seen people use the original pagemaker 9 on an internet-disconnected XP machine to hand-make circuit masks (ok it is just this one awesome old person who still etches his circuits with FeCl3, but I digress). It's just that I paid for a first class, "this is the best we offer, for a price you're gonna pay upfront" software 6 months ago, and now that feeling gone. nothing really tangible was lost, but seriously, if the entirety of the Affinity suite was deleted, nothing would be lost anyway. You could still use figma, photopea and the like to get all your work done just like before. just not with the same cohesion and confidence and security maybe, and that's what serif had sold before this.
- julianz 11mo agoI paid for V1, it had incompatibilities with graphics drivers that mean it stopped working properly shortly after V2 came out and is now useless. Any hardware assisted graphics operation corrupts the image. Who knows if V2 will suffer something similar?
- reaperducer 11mo agoV2 is probably now useless considering that it will never get any updates. Is it really? People on HN are always talking about how they use pre-Creative Cloud versions of Adobe products years and years later. My firewall already blocks Affinity programs from accessing the internet without my permission. I guess I'll set it to an automatic deny so I don't lose any features, or have to deal with any nagging.
- tredre3 11mo agoPeople on HN also tend to use Apple hardware so it's no surprise that for them unmaintained software is dead software, because it will likely break 2 or 3 macOS versions from now.
- prmoustache 11mo ago> . V2 is probably now useless considering that it will never get any updates. How does it becomes useless? Until there is a new format that you absolutely can't avoid on your day to day life there is no reason you cannot use it the same way you have used it until now. I think a lot of that feeling is just FOMO.