cajhin

There should be an option to disable the update reminder, for casual users like me. I have no desire to install every point release, I don't use it that intensely, and my simple task works just dandy without the latest 580MB update.
It has an unpleasant shareware smell when you get nagged every*single*time*you*start*it.
I'd be happy to be reminded of the major versions (1.9, 1.10, ...)

I'm surprised everyone agrees with "That is not my experience.". Curious.
My steps:
1. in Firefox, copy an image
2. in AP, File > New from Clipboard
3. Select the Color Picker tool
4. Click on the image, let's say a red pixel.
    Result:
    A) the color circles at the bottom of the toolbar show "background: (Red circle)" (good, this is how every other software works)
    B) the whole image is tinted red (did not expect that)
5. Undo 4. (the color circle again shows "no color (/)"
6. Uncheck "Apply to Selection" in the tool settings bar
7. Click on a red pixel again.
    Result: nothing happens. The color circle still shows (/), the image is unchanged
Why?
 
P.S. @loukash, I did spend quite a bit of time with AP when Corona hit, I bought the books, I watched dozens of videos. Three years later, I still occasionally fail miserably at supposedly simple tasks that I cannot figure out.

I'm surprised everyone agrees with "That is not my experience.". Curious.
My steps:
1. in Firefox, copy an image
2. in AP, File > New from Clipboard
3. Select the Color Picker tool
4. Click on the image, let's say a red pixel.
    Result:
    A) the color circles at the bottom of the toolbar show "background: (Red circle)" (good, this is how every other software works)
    B) the whole image is tinted red (did not expect that)
5. Undo 4. (the color circle again shows "no color (/)"
6. Uncheck "Apply to Selection" in the tool settings bar
7. Click on a red pixel again.
    Result: nothing happens. The color circle still shows (/), the image is unchanged
Why?
 
P.S. @loukash, I did spend quite a bit of time with AP when Corona hit, I bought the books, I watched dozens of videos. Three years later, I still occasionally fail miserably at supposedly simple tasks that I cannot figure out.

Thanks for making the effort.
My point is not that I need help, now that I know about it.
My point is that, as an educated Windows user, the INTUITIVE way to get help on a topic is to press F1 or go to menu > help. Which works, just not very well.
I think AP would be a little better, if the app would guide you towards the much better online help immediately, instead of forcing you to figure it out.
But I'll rest my case; there are more important things that are hard to figure out intuitively.
 

Hi @cajhin,
I've now replicated and logged this issue with the developers, many thanks for the detailed steps.

There should be an option to disable the update reminder, for casual users like me. I have no desire to install every point release, I don't use it that intensely, and my simple task works just dandy without the latest 580MB update.
It has an unpleasant shareware smell when you get nagged every*single*time*you*start*it.
I'd be happy to be reminded of the major versions (1.9, 1.10, ...)

This is not true. You're conflating two different technologies here, MSIX (a packaging / installation technology, nothing to do with design or UI frameworks, or tiles or tablets, or touch screens etc) with UWP. The latter was their failed attempt at a new design metaphor and UI framework.
 

Pros:
MSI had an installation success rate of ~85% (and we have many requests to our tech support team for v1 install failures). MSIX promises a 99.9% success rate.  MSI requires admin privileges to install. MSIX installs per-user, but files are deduplicated so that disk space isn't wasted. MSI apps are not sandboxed from other applications, meaning other applications can break those apps (we have seen this with several third-party apps in the past). MSIX apps are sandboxed to prevent this. MSI updates require a manual download of the full ~550mb installer which must be manually installed. MSIX can perform in-app delta updates which are smaller and faster. MSI updates can only be performed one at a time. MSIX can update all three apps simultaneously. MSI cannot guarantee that an uninstall will leave your machine in the exact state prior to install. MSIX installs are segregated and don't rely on the registry or special filesystem locations meaning an uninstall always leaves you in a clean state. Installation and app data paths are cleaned on uninstall. MSI apps cannot integrate with Microsoft Photos app to provide "Edit In..." style features. MSIX can. MSI does not require a digital signature. MSIX does (this means any MSIX that appears to be from Serif, will be guaranteed to be from us and only us). Cons:
MSI can allow the user to change the installation directory. MSIX can move installed apps to different drives, but it cannot choose a specific directory (due to the sandbox). See below: MSI can allow an option to install a desktop shortcut. MSIX doesn't provide this as an option, but you can pin the apps to either the Start Menu or the Taskbar. There is also the secret Shell:AppsFolder location in Explorer that allows you to right-click or drag the icon to your Desktop for a shortcut as a workaround if you need it.  MSI has easy discovery of undocumented app locations for launching from a third-party. MSIX hides the install location due to the sandbox, but we use App Execution Alias to enable this scenario. You can find the aliases in the following location: C:\Users\username\AppData\Local\Microsoft\WindowsApps\AffinityDesigner2.exe
C:\Users\username\AppData\Local\Microsoft\WindowsApps\AffinityPhoto2.exe
C:\Users\username\AppData\Local\Microsoft\WindowsApps\AffinityPublisher2.exe
Remembering to replace username with your Windows username. Also, those paths are already in your %PATH% variable so you can often launch them without even specifying the full path, e.g. just AffinityPhoto2.exe. There are bugs in some third-party applications with the App Execution Alias , and the next post includes aflaunch.exe as a work around if you need that instead. 
 

Above all, I would like to thank you for this reply to your user base.  I am sure not all would agree with me, but you presented these issues in a timely and honest comment and I agree with all of your explanations.  Having owned/operated a small business for 53 years dealing with the public I know for a fact you cannot please everyone.  But your team has done an extraordinary job.  You all should be pleased.  Thanks.

Hi All,
Well, it’s been a pretty crazy week since the launch of V2!
This has been a real labour of love for us over the last year or so, and I can’t even begin to describe how hard the development team have worked on it. Not only getting the V2 apps launched, but also of course finally bringing Publisher to iPad. 
With this being our first paid-for upgrade there has understandably been a lot of feedback / questions around future updates and our pricing policies. I thought it was worth addressing / clarifying our position on some of these personally...
Updates to V2 moving forward
Buying V2 not only gets you all the new features you have seen, but we have various updates planned – including many more new features and improvements – which you will get for free. This will continue until such a time that V3 is released. We’re not sure exactly when V3 will be, but I can confirm we are not going to move to anything as regular as an annual upgrade cycle as has been speculated.
It’s worth saying too that V2 does include many under-the-hood changes to our underlying technology, and we have also been investing in several new areas of research recently. Some of these haven’t manifested themselves into new features yet, but overall V2 does give us a better platform to develop on moving forward and I’m sure you will be pleased with the updates V2 will receive.
Updates to V1 moving forward
While we did say on the FAQ that V1 would no longer receive any updates, I want to clarify that was about new feature updates. We will be updating V1 to fix any critical problems caused by operating system updates in the future. So if the next version of macOS breaks V1 we will endeavour to fix it. There will be a point in time when continuing to maintain V1 in this way will not be tenable, but certainly for the foreseeable future we will continue to patch. In fact, we have an update to V1 queued up for release very shortly with some fixes for Ventura and issues caused by a recent Windows security / quality update. 
We will update our FAQ shortly to make that clearer for everyone.
Offer period
In case you didn’t see, I’m pleased to confirm we have decided to run this initial launch offer until 14th December to give everyone the best chance possible to get it if they wish / have a decent amount of time to trial it. 
Upgrade pricing
It’s been really hard to see some of the comments about us not looking after our existing customers – we’re pretty devasted that anyone feels like that to be honest. But the fact is we felt our hands were tied somewhat with being able to offer upgrade pricing in a fair way. The main reason for this was App Store customers (which make up around 35% of our userbase). The problems with that are two-fold: firstly, we didn’t have a way from within V1 to validate an App Store purchase receipt to reliably ensure customers who were entitled to an upgrade could get one; and secondly, we could not find a good way for people to get that discount via the App Store. Us pushing upgrade customers to go exclusively via our own site (including customers who were previously acquired via the app stores) may also have put us in violation of App Store Ts & Cs which we were obviously concerned about.
I’m not saying that these issues were completely insurmountable, but any solutions we came up with would be messy, and most importantly could have resulted in some bona fide V1 customers struggling to get validated and claim their discount. We certainly don’t have the support resource here if we ended up needing to manually validate tens of thousands of receipts for example.
The only option we felt was safe to move forward with was a general launch offer, which would guarantee that every V1 customer could get the discount, whether they purchased directly through us or the App Stores. We knew a side effect of that would mean some new customers would end up receiving that same discount – but we felt that was a better option than V1 customers missing out. It’s also worth saying that while there has been some good press about V2, all our main marketing has been via email and through social media to our followers. In other words, we felt ok about it because we knew the vast majority of people who would find out about it or take advantage of the offer would be existing customers. I would be surprised if over the offer period customers upgrading from V1 didn’t make up more than 90% of our sales.
Overall I do believe us giving a 40% discount, along with the addition of the new Universal Licence of course, is offering fantastic value for money for those who want to upgrade. 
However, taking on board some of the feedback there is something extra we can do – we will offer a new free bundle of content exclusively for V1 customers upgrading to V2 as an extra thank you for your support. I’ve seen this suggested by a number of customers and it’s a great idea as it does remove the App Store conflict entirely. 
We’ll need a little time to put something together, but all customers who previously registered or purchased V1 and have since upgraded to V2 will receive a voucher code for this via email as soon as we can.
A comment on no subscription
I do want to say that some of the points above are exactly the reason why software companies move to subscription. Whatever you do with upgrade pricing, you still have the issue of customers who bought the previous version 3 months ago vs. those who have had it 2+ years. Offering perpetual licences also gives the additional overhead of needing to maintain the previous version longer than you would if everyone was on subscription / generally always on the latest version.
We are a small team so some of these complications are not ideal — all we really want to do is focus on developing our latest codebase, push out regular updates and continue with our mission to make great creative software accessible to everyone. 
But it does need to be funded somehow. We know you love our no-subscription model, but there also needs to be a level of appreciation that the alternative is having paid-for upgrades from time to time. That unfortunately comes with its own problems.
All of that said, I have to say we have been blown away with the response to V2 - around 3 times as many people have upgraded in the last week than we expected - and we really can't thank you enough for the support you have shown. More than anything the success of this upgrade puts us in a great place to continue investing heavily in development which is ultimately what it's all about, and we’re super excited to crack on with some great updates coming next year!
All the best,
Ash

+1
I just bought the "all-in" license, because of this announcement. Was planning to stay on v1 before (tried the Win app store once, PITA).
Thanks for listening, good company as usual

Hi all. Thanks for your patience over the weekend when our offices were closed.
We've had a meeting this morning and decided to ALSO offer MSI installers to those people who would like them. I can't tell you when this will happen, as there is engineering work that will be required to allow this to happen, but we hope it won't be long.
Thanks for your feedback!

Well, I want to like AP and there's enough complaining on the internet these days, but I gotta agree with the original post.
I'm a long time amateur, and used AP for maybe 80 hours since last spring. I've read the book and watched videos, and still I'm regularly frustrated with very basic tasks.
Just to show the Experts what occasional users are struggling with:
I want to draw a smiley then copy&paste it somewhere. 60 seconds?
(upgrading to 1.9 on my 2nd machine, that doesn't count)
 
Start AP, create new document, hit B, paint. Done?
 
... Nothing happens. Why? Once more, troubleshooting starts.
1. I remember the tools cycle by default. 'B' selected the wrong tool.
   -> it really shouldn't cycle unless I hit it two or more times in a row?
2. I select the brush from the toolbar
   Oops, that wasn't the paint brush. That was the identical brush icon with the tiny semi-transparent selection circle.
   -> some things in AP are really too subtle and difficult to see (for me).
      (and don't get me started on the shades of blue in the layer panel)
3. Paint again... nothing happens
   Activate and Check the colors panel
   -> I think the color is so important, it should always be visible on paint. Maybe on the status or tool settings bar.
   Check the layers panel. Ah, there is no layer. Add a pixel layer.
   -> pixel layer on new doc should be added by default?
4. I think it's time to turn on the assistant again. Where is it?
   Help... search 'Assistant'. Finds
   "Assistant Manager:  Controls rasterization behaviour".
   This doesn't sound like Clippy the newbie guide? Back to the view menu.
   -> I appreciate the documentation, it is very well written in it's own way.
      It just never helps me help with solving stupid problems.
   -> I would keep the Assistant on if it wasn't for the distracting popups.
      Would be nice if it 'popped up' in the status bar instead.
   -> I would LOVE it if the assistant just advised. Don't grab the steering wheel, don't add the layer, just say in the status bar
      "You cannot paint because there is no layer" or "because the selected layer is not a pixel layer"
5. I can now paint but the line is too thin. Why are there no settings on top?
   Might be caused by the update. Check View > Studio... > .... nope.
   Nuclear option: "Reset Studio". Still no tool settings, why? Ah, it's "Show context toolbar"
   -> "Show tool settings" would be more intuitive. I'm not looking for "context", and this is not a toolbar, it has no tools in it?
Finished. Took me ~1200 seconds (+5 minutes angry cigarette break) instead of the estimated 60.
I could go on, but I think I made my point.
It doesn't have to be either 'Powerful for Pros' or 'Intuitively usable for mildly skilled amateurs'.
There are many things I like about AP, it's just too many things where you have to learn (and remember!!) little details that shouldn't be a problem in the first place.
 
Update: challenge, quick! Where's the paint brush?