Artsketch

Since upgrade prices are not possible, please give everyone upgrading to V2 a free trash bin and some checkboxes instead.

Maybe you can find a way to offer a special upgrade price for V3.

Maybe you can find a way to offer a special upgrade price for V3.

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

Only OS compatibility if necessary 

Sigh. I thought it would be obvious that this wasn’t a new ‘feature request’. It was a one-off review off the first major upgrade to Affinity‘s ‘pro’ apps, pulling together a bunch of missing features that I happen to think are most important. 
Yes, these features have been requested more than once already, over many years. (I’ve linked to some of those discussions). That’s kind of the point—they were things we might have expected to be in V2, and their omission is a signal to me that Affinity’s software designers don’t rate the importance of these things highly.
If this isn’t the place for an overall review and discussion of V2 and its most glaring missing features, how about being a little constructive and telling me where the right place is? I did look at all the options, and the ‘Feedback for the Affinity V2 suite of products’ certainly seemed like the best fit.

Thank you very much! That is very important giving some time to switch completely to V2, that I already bought.

Dear Affinity,
V2 Designer on iPad is awesome, but…
By far, the trash can delete was my most used button in V1.
One click anytime to delete…how can you beat that?
Swiping is not convenient.
 

For Mac users only.*
If you are concerned about version one files getting inadvertently updated to version 2 file format then I suggest you pause right now and go and "lock" all your old version one files. This will allow you to open the file in either version one or 2 but you won't be able to save it, you'll have to do a Save As....
Locking is done in the finder with the Get Info box. You can do it in bulk by using Command + Option + I to bring up one window for dozens, hundreds of files.
 
* I would expect Windows to have some sort of similar way of locking.

I agree 100%
I experience the same problem.
AD for Ipad is my daily driver, but after playing around with the new version I have to admit: this is not what I have expected.
AD vers. 1 was more intuitive, user friendly. It was this type of software I didn't have to wonder what to do.
The workflow was fast, now I feel like a child lost in the forest.
The UI/UX  IS A MESS ;-(
Personally, I prefer the functions name with small icon to understand what it does.
I don't like the square color swatches in vers.2  When you select color from the side bar the icon is circular but in the swatches is square it's very confusing, it looks like its not a part of this feature.
Other thing, You have to make so many clicks to get to different option/menus- too many operations.
Could you give us back the old control sliders and  bin icon.
My suggestion, You shoud offer users a choice:  UI Interface v1/v2 through preference, or small icon on the top bar to switch betweet them.
Anyways, I dont have any remarks regarding desktop version so far. Good job.

Thank you very much! That is very important giving some time to switch completely to V2, that I already bought.

There is a new 2022 EU law for a 2 year warranty on digital goods and software, including software updates to keep them usable: https://blog.intigriti.com/2022/06/27/new-eu-law-changing-game-digital-goods-producers/
 

We already have plans for v1 OS compatibility patches. I have no idea what time frames / duration are being considered, but we will try to ensure that v1 remains usable for some time. 

There is a new 2022 EU law for a 2 year warranty on digital goods and software, including software updates to keep them usable: https://blog.intigriti.com/2022/06/27/new-eu-law-changing-game-digital-goods-producers/
 

There is a new 2022 EU law for a 2 year warranty on digital goods and software, including software updates to keep them usable: https://blog.intigriti.com/2022/06/27/new-eu-law-changing-game-digital-goods-producers/
 

There is a new 2022 EU law for a 2 year warranty on digital goods and software, including software updates to keep them usable: https://blog.intigriti.com/2022/06/27/new-eu-law-changing-game-digital-goods-producers/
 

There is a new 2022 EU law for a 2 year warranty on digital goods and software, including software updates to keep them usable: https://blog.intigriti.com/2022/06/27/new-eu-law-changing-game-digital-goods-producers/
 

Two years would be better to avoid class action lawsuits from users in the EU who bought V1 recently.

Knife tool in Designer
Publisher for iPadOS
Nondestructive RAW in Photo

Maybe it would be a good move to ensure the OS compatibility of V1 for another 2 years? 
No bug fixes, no updates, no new features, just a patch if the operating systems require it in the next 2 years. Maybe nothing needs to be done at all. The customer gains security, time to get used to V2 and Serif has enough time to take care of V2 optimization and get lost confidence back for free.

Affinity Designer never was overpriced with its unique vector and pixel capabilities in one app. Since 2021 the Apple Pencil works too as it should.

Maybe people are afraid and angry that "lifetime" V1 isn't working anymore on next MacOS and iPadOS? It is ok to sell the V2 upgrade, but why exclude at least a necessary update to keep V1 running on next OS? Maybe it isn't necessary. 

And Vectornator

That need skilled developers and effort.

Sorry Friends,
we have been discussing about marketing strategies, prices, ethics etc. We were wrong. The real point is that this version 2 is not a real release, just a beta version (alpha?).
I am having lot of problems with Publisher: cannot save, cannot load, broken links, stops with endless wait, tables without row and column labels, etc. I need to save the file every few minutes, and saving is a jump in the dark. What could happen this time?
Someone felt insulted by a previous opinion from me. Now I feel me insulted by an early release, with very difficult way back to V1.
Dear Serif, you are playing with our time and our work, do you understand that?
Fully ready to cooperate for bug fixing, my aim is the result, not arguing.