GhostlyCat

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
This is a duplicate post of a thread that is now locked and moved to the questions forum

It's not that different between Apple and Microsoft here. If your application model perfectly fits the OS application architecture and you only have to support one single OS, then you can just implement it straight forward in a way that makes OSA support (or COM/OLE) relatively easy. Easy... for an API that got developed 32 years ago and which predates anything that happened with the Internet and the mobile world since then.
If you model doesn't fit perfectly, this doesn't mean that it is not possible to implement OSA for it - it just depends how flexible your application architecture is developed. For nearly any non-trivial application this is the case. Don't get me wrong - I don't say that it is "to difficult" or anything like that - I'm just sceptical about marketing drivel about things like this because I know this things in reality and beyond keynote demos.
Every time I used it I - at the same time - did marvel the possibilities and curse the peculiarity and fragility of it. Sadly it's a technology that shows its age. It's indeed a dead man walking. And knowing how it works makes clear that it will never will go beyond the Mac and it might even go to the happy hunting ground following so many Apple technologies in the past. Not today. Not tomorrow... but it will happen.
Shortcuts is really young, but it is also extremely promising. It's much (!) easier to support (imho). Supporting it would work not only on macOS but also the iPad... which is a _very_ important platform for Affinity. Thats way I think Shortcuts is more important than OSA. Which does not mean that I would oppose OSA capability of macOS Affinity.
Again: Don't get me wrong - it is very very useful... 
Pixelmator Pro... you mean the thing that still isn't on iOS and never was ported to Windows?
DevonThink which doesn't support AppleScript (and many other things the Mac version has)?
Affinity is a first class citizen on iPad and not some crippled afterthought.
 
As I've written - it is just my opinion that AppleScript and OSA is on the way out and Shortcuts the thing that is getting traction. Of course this is just one view on this topic. I indeed might make sense to support OSA if a big part of Affinity customers are Mac-only.
So I'm not opposed to supporting OSA, but I prefer Shortcuts support because I use both: macOS and iPadOS on a daily base.

Its true, that layered TIFF is not just PSD embedded in TIFF but more like a TIFF container implementation of the PSD Format. Technically layered TIFF is practically as native to Photoshop as PSD - there is only one thing missing: Duotone.
 
The same problems of compatibility with PSD account exactly the same to layered TIFF: One point is crucial - there always seems to be a mismatch between _import_ and _export_:
 
1) Import
Import means how much of Photoshops features get recognized in PSD/TIFF and applied to their Affinity counterparts. Think of Grouped layers, layer modes, adjustment layers, smart objects (!) and so on. What about smart objects which use third party Smart filters?
 
2) Export
Most people think PSD/TIF-Support is a symmetric thing - but this is absolutely not the case. Most non-Adobe programs can IMPORT more Photoshop-Features than they can export. This may sound illogical, but exporting from a Program like Affinity to PSD means mapping Affinity-native Features to Photoshops counterparts (which may not exist or not be really accessible). While on import the developers can extend their own Features to cope for Photoshop-Behaviours - this is not possible in the export direction.
 
Conclusion:
 
The route to support layered TIFF besides of PSD in Affinity opens up collaborating with tools of different vendors on some file to some degree (to the degree how good the TIFF/PSD export is - which is limited).
 
The route to embed .aphoto into a TIFF would be perfect for collaboration with RAW workflow software like Capture One or Lightroom. It would be the PERFECT answer to all those questions about a DAM-Module. Those programs only need the merged down version of the image to export or to apply their own non-destructive adjustments on. Editing such a TIFF would just replace the internal .aphoto with a changed one and update the merged down layer. All nondestructive adjustments in the workflow software will then apply to this new merged down image. Since there is a .aphoto in the file, Affinity Photo can actually export any feature that is possible within this suite into it. It would also be possible to open the TIFF in Affinity Designer to add some vector stuff. The downside of this approach is, that any other program would just see the one merged layer and editing it with such a program may destroy the internal .aphoto.
 
I personally really like the "embed .aphoto" approach - this would be the one approach that would allow me to drop my CC subscription. As long as "layered TIFFs" would only offer exporting limited features of Affinity Photo - this would be well... limited.
 
So in an ideal world there would be both options supported. Or even all of those:
 
1) Flattened TIFF (as now)
2) Layered TIFF, compatibility maximized (as good as possible to Photoshop layered TIFF)
3) Layered TIFF, features maximized (contains .aphoto and a flattened Layer)
4) Layered TIFF complete (combination of 2 and 3 - no flattened Layer)
 
To me only 2 and 3 are really relevant and if I had to choose only one it would be 3.
 
ciao,
Jochen