Amnesiac

You have to wonder what the issue with the Android market is if Adobe won't develop for it. The market leader I think is Samsung and having had a few Samsung devices where they couldn't give a fig for users once the hardware's been purchased I do wonder if the APIs for their various generation of pens etc aren't consistent/backwards compatible etc. I'm not close enough to anyone developing on the Android or for Samsung devices to know but Adobe's behaviour is suggestive. That said, as OriolFM has pointed out Clip Studio seem to have a cross OS development platform that's working for them - perhaps if you're starting from scratch on such a platform it's much easier than refactoring from your current one to such a toolset. Again not close enough to anything other than speculate. Interested to hear from someone who does know. As an aside I agree that pirating early Photoshop versions was much easier than it is today and fairly trivial for someone with the appropriate skills and motivation but the venn diagram between those folks and those NEEDING to use the tool professionally was quite limited I think. Hence my 'arms race' comment on anti-piracy. Thank you for yours in return - and I did thanks :-) [Edited out some typos]

Android (& IOS) are subscription only the Mac/Win versions are perpetual licence. Shame - I'd have tried it if I could buy the software for my tablets and not just rent it.

It's a lovely idea but I don't think it washes. Adobe was adopted by professionals who did pay the higher licence fee and didn't pirate thus allowing Adobe to invest further in features that professionals wanted. Yes it was easier to pirate (and I'm sure it's possible to pirate Adobe now) but making it the professional tool of choice was what they were interested in and removing any competition in that space. Being only on the Mac platform in the late 80s (getting acquired by Adobe in 1990) when Mac was the creative community platform of choice helped that too. The Windows version arrived in '92. There are tools from even higher end markets like the medium format cameras that did similar; ie go for a smaller high margin market. The fact that we're talking a Photoshop and not Lightroom replacement in these threads indicates the Adobe professional focus and why they were successful I think. I'd also note that Adobe tried to reduce piracy throughout the lifetime of their products. I think they just won the arms race. I might concede that they went subscription when they thought they'd got piracy beat but not the argument that they deliberately allowed it. Professionals will pay for the tools of their trade as I've mentioned before if you have a business need then you'll go buy an IOS tablet if you have a need for a tablet based business tool or the Windows version on a Surface or similar. As to the numbers of each platform, IOS vs Android I think the addressable market is more important than the total numbers when deciding if/when to invest. I don't think Affinity think the addressable Android market is there yet, and if they think to address the market we won't know until they decide to release the product (though I'm sure if you want to stalk job openings you might be able to see if they start hiring Android devs).

I'm not sure that piracy is more prevalent on Android than other platforms, nor that the circumventions on other platforms don't apply to Android also. I would be interested in any stats you have to back that assertion up.

As has been noted here already Serif have invested in a code base that delivers on Windows and Apple. They would need to support a 3rd code base to offer feature parity on Android. For whatever reason it's clearly not cost effective for them to do as a business. I wish they would too but it seems that Android tablets are too much of a niche market for them to take a punt on.

I agree with a lot of what you say. But to be fair Serif don't support iphones only ipads so the comparison would have to be with android tablets. I do have a 2014 Samsung tablet which sits on my kitchen counter running the apps for all the services I subscribe to. I have an S3 and S7, the latter seems to get updates frequently, but they really don't seem to do much to improve anything. A lot if not all the apps I use on my tablets work across the 3 devices, but, like you I see no value in an android tablet any more. I was never able to replace my laptop with one and the pen API is either so hard to use or such a small market share that there are no good pen interface apps. My 2004 WindowsCE phone had better handwriting recognition and as good drawing apps! The problem with Android is having made it a success by making it open source Google are bringing back into being a proprietary OS by adding all the value into Google only libraries so anytime anything new and interesting is added the library now is in a Google app not an Android one. Also for Google you the person paying for that device are NOT their customer (you ARE the customer of Samsung etc) but you're the data mine that Google selling to ITS customers so changes that are better for their customers are going to get added in asap regardless of the ecosystem for end-users.

OK, I had a look at the Mac and Windows bug tracking fora and they look much of a muchness to me. If there are some definitive relative bug tracking stats somewhere happy to be pointed to them. I use Affinity on Mac and Windows and don't notice any differences really other than those of the underlying environment. Serif of course were a Windows shop long before they did any Mac software so I don't think the assertion that they are Apple focused is necessarily true (unless of course they are making a lot more money from that user-base, in which case who can blame them?)

Ummm... it is available on Windows... hows that "only Apple"?? If there are issues with the V2 software (I've only noticed one minor bug) then how is developing for a whole new platform going to help that?

Neither of which is a photo editing app, neither of which as far as I am aware has a desktop presence. I am not sure of the point you're trying to make. I don't know the target markets or tooling either vendors (or Serif) have which might make it more of a sensible business decision for one or the other and how much legacy code they've had to port. All of this is my point. It might look easy to do cross platform software development (in my experience not, and my very limited and ancient experience with mobile devices even less so), and yes there are more and more toolsets to help it get done but without knowing the ins and outs of it then the assumption that seems to be being made that (a) it's easy & therefore (b) Serif must have some ulterior motive not to do it just doesn't hold water for me. I think that if it were low hanging fruit they'd have plucked it by now. As I've repeatedly pointed out I'd LOVE an Android tablet version of Affinity Photo.

Yup it's the point - They're a business. Go cost it up yourself, then look into the market share and what % of the addressable market they might command and then tell me you'd invest your cash in it. I've done this kind of thing for a living in the past & the numbers can be scary. I'd take as evidence that it's not a guaranteed money maker by the very limited choice of such applications on the Android platform. If it were worth doing there would be a much bigger choice of drawing package on Android tablets; the fact that there isn't would say to me that most people who've done their sums have come to a similar conclusion as Serif. Now market conditions do change... so there's always hope.

Yes, assuming that subset is large enough - Adobe is a big corporation with subscription revenues their ROI calculation & risk appetite is going to be very different from Serif's. If Samsung have done a good job with their S-pen APIs it's a good choice too as the high end Samsungs have a proper digitiser built in I'd certainly love to have Affinity on my S4 or S6 tablets.

I find it disappointing but it's not a personal insult that a vendor doesn't make a product for your personal choice of hardware. Agreed, that's why I've paid for V2 as soon as I saw that it was available on both Windows and Mac (I don't own an iPad but I do have some Android tablets) and I'd pay for Affinity if/when it ever comes to Android. Serif clearly don't have any exclusivity agreements with Apple and I doubt they have any agreements with Apple at all. They are after all available on Windows for a start! The fact that they gave Apple permission to use their products or materials is probably seen by them as good free advertising and if MS wanted to do the same they'd probably be happy for them to as well. And here's the nub; what is 'a substantial number' for a one-off payment app? Developing for a new platform isn't easy it's not a simple matter; a whole dev team would be needed new skills, etc etc. It's a matter of, if we as a company invest in this platform what is the return on investment over what timeframe and is it worth us spending money on? Don't forget money then has to be spent to cover the on-going development and maintenance costs etc etc which are NOT cheap esp given that the Android devices are much less homogenous than iPads. I suspect that the costs just don't add up and they are a small business who don't have the resources to throw at things, and in the markets they ARE in already they need to spend that investment on keeping the bugs fixed and the products current. There are lots of good apps on IOS not available on Android but probably for the same reasons their developers haven't ported them either. For people who NEED Affinity products (rather than want) them on a tablet I suspect they've gone and bought an iPad. I suspect their rationale will be at a personal level like Affinity's... if I use this tablet will it make me enough in fees for it to pay for itself in a reasonable timeframe... if yes... buy device!

@ pixelstuff you're right - I didn't consider Chromebooks as, for me, they fail in too many respects - the one I have used, a freebie given to my wife, went to charity as it was neither fish nor fowl. Obviously other people have different views/budgets/priorities to ours and they hit a sweet spot for them. So, yes a fair point and a small but maybe growing user-base. It'd be interesting to see how that develops and the average revenue per user that the platform drives for developers and how much of the addressable market Affinity feel they could command.

So. Yes - Affinity if you're reading this +1 for Android tablet version. To the general conversation - I don't hate Apple (I use MacOS as my main driver) but I also use Windows and Linux (don't hate either) - though the rumoured requirement in the next release of Win 11 that I have to log into an MS account to use it means I'd revert to 10 as even Apple don't require that! The lack of a single desktop and API means desktop Linux is I imagine a nightmare to support. I chose Android as my phone OS back in the day over IOS as it was too locked down and too expensive for what it was, and it's just a phone. I still (mostly) feel the same way. I don't live off my phone. I certainly wouldn't consider using any of the Affinity products on a phone. I imagine that the bulk of Android is running on phones and Affinity on IOS won't run on an iPhone either. I have run a commercial software company and supporting different platforms is hard, and making sure bug fixing on one doesn't have side effects on another consumes a LOT of regression testing, and yes a good dev-ops chain helps but doesn't cure. Also I did commercial software and I can't think, having done some game infrastructure support on handsets, it's easier for consumer software. Finally I don't know if Affinity use a toolkit to support MacOS/IOS & Windows, but if they do, and that toolkit doesn't offer a Linux or Android flavour then porting becomes even more of an issue. I too think that the top end Android devices are as good/better than the IOS equivalents, I currently have an S4 and S6 despite not being a Samsung fan, simply because they are very good devices. Android supports a mouse cursor out of the box, so that's a possibility for a more desktop like experience and equivalence when running on Android. On Samsungs the s-pen built-in would be a good thing to support (assuming Samsung have a sensible api and maintain it properly). Anyway - I doubt (very happy to be proved wrong) based on my personal experience seeing them being used is that the number of equivalent Android tablets is even close to the number of iPads. As other's have said Affinity will make their own business decisions based on their view of the ROI for their product sets. I hope that the interest in this thread informs that decision in a positive way, despite the sometimes hysterical and confrontational nature of the conversation and that we get an Android version as I'd buy both Photo and Designer straight away. Just my penny's worth of course.