Mark Ingram

Yes, we will be providing MSI installers to customers who require them. This FAQ will be updated with links to MSI downloads when they become available.
Yes. These are now available
 

As well as doing our best to work around the problems (such as providing MSI installers, or launcher apps) with other applications such as "Fast Raw Viewer" it would be a good idea if customers could also contact them to let them know of the bug in their software that prevents the "App Execution Alias" from being launched. 

Yes, we will be providing MSI installers to customers who require them. This FAQ will be updated with links to MSI downloads when they become available.
Yes. These are now available
 

As well as doing our best to work around the problems (such as providing MSI installers, or launcher apps) with other applications such as "Fast Raw Viewer" it would be a good idea if customers could also contact them to let them know of the bug in their software that prevents the "App Execution Alias" from being launched. 

Hi,
Sorry that you feel hard done by. I can only see a copy of one Affinity application bought in November 2021 bought during our 30% off sale. As a matter of interest how much discount would you have expected ?

Yes, we will be providing MSI installers to customers who require them. This FAQ will be updated with links to MSI downloads when they become available.
Yes. These are now available
 

For anyone that would like to work around issues with launching our apps from third-party applications (e.g. DxO, ACDSee, etc), I have written a launcher utility that you can place anywhere on your system, and it will take care of calling our apps, with any required arguments.
Usage: aflaunch -a name -b build [args] -a name : One of the following Designer2 Photo2 [Default] Publisher2 -b build : One of the following Retail [Default] Beta MSStore args : [Optional] All remaining arguments to be passed onto the target application (must be last)  
The -a and -b arguments are optional, so you can ignore them unless you want to launch a different app, or the beta or MS Store versions.
I have signed the exe as well, so it will have a valid digital signature.
Please let me know how you get on with this.
Updated: 12/11/2022 @ 11:04am UTC. Now deals with spaces in filenames.
 aflaunch.zip

For anyone that would like to work around issues with launching our apps from third-party applications (e.g. DxO, ACDSee, etc), I have written a launcher utility that you can place anywhere on your system, and it will take care of calling our apps, with any required arguments.
Usage: aflaunch -a name -b build [args] -a name : One of the following Designer2 Photo2 [Default] Publisher2 -b build : One of the following Retail [Default] Beta MSStore args : [Optional] All remaining arguments to be passed onto the target application (must be last)  
The -a and -b arguments are optional, so you can ignore them unless you want to launch a different app, or the beta or MS Store versions.
I have signed the exe as well, so it will have a valid digital signature.
Please let me know how you get on with this.
Updated: 12/11/2022 @ 11:04am UTC. Now deals with spaces in filenames.
 aflaunch.zip

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. 
 

+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

Yes, we will be providing MSI installers to customers who require them. This FAQ will be updated with links to MSI downloads when they become available.
Yes. These are now available
 

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!

Yes, we will be providing MSI installers to customers who require them. This FAQ will be updated with links to MSI downloads when they become available.
Yes. These are now available
 

Thanks for the regular windows installer in advance - with your decision you have won another v2-upgrader and loyal customer 🙂

No, you cannot transfer or sell the licence. You can ask for a refund, or, you can wait for the MSI installer to become available. 

Except we can't do that for all v1 customers because of the Apple and Microsoft app stores. We would have had to pull the apps from those stores in order to "force" people to acquire it from ourselves, in order to offer the v2 Universal Licence on our site.
 

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!

I did not.
What, please, does Serif's decision to use MSIX installers lock you in to.
It's true that it means you cannot choose the exact install path, but I don't see why that is a big deal in any practical terms. It's also true that due to poor designs of some 3rd-party apps, or bugs in them, they could not link to the V2 apps. But that is solvable without you being able to choose an install directory.
 

Are you talking about installing on Windows 7? That's what this topic is about. If you are taking about Windows 7,  V2 requires Windows 10, so installing shouldn't matter.
But to answer your question: 
Also, for help installing on a different drive: 
 

Hi all!
I am Russian and I do not support this war, we sold everything and the whole family went to live in Montenegro, since May we have been living and working here and are not going to return, the youngest son goes to a local school, the eldest works, we all have a residence permit!
I was very pleased with release 2.0, I used to buy only Photo, but today I read that they added a new one and bought it, I bought it not for rubles, but for euros, from a local bank card, but when I saw that there was no Russian interface, I was annoyed, looked at the forum, saw that it was not one such and decided to write!
I perfectly understand and support the policy of Affinity about not selling their products in the aggressor country, but people who not only left, but also those who stayed and do not support the regime need to work, receive money for their continued existence.
I ask you, please, return the Russian interface, or for example, add Serbian, we want it, because we want to get citizenship here in the future!

Seneca, for info, no need to get a refund from the Microsoft store 
One can buy on SERIF website / on APPLE Store / on MICROSOFT Store and still use freely all apps on all platforms:
iPad
Mac
Windows
 
That's great actually 

Lee... your folks have responded and are implementing a refund to me.  I want to thank them, you, and the Serif group in general for providing a high level of customer service.  Based on my experience you guys do service right in addition to providing quality products at great prices.
Peace.

Glad you're sorted now @Gaul. To confirm, yes it's just a bug which prevents the button from becoming enabled when it should be.

Found the issue
In Mac OS version, the button "My Account" is greyed out but it can be accessed via these 2 ways:
Re-open the App -> will kick-off a separate window with the "Account" information Click on new file -> will kick-off a separate window with the "Account" information

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