nzBill

On my iMac running Big Sur 11.5, all three of Affinity Photo, Designer and Publisher caused this problem when trying to update them to 1.10. Rebooting macOS did not help. The "Extracting update" progress bar displayed after the download progressed to about 15% and froze there for several hours! Unwilling to wait overnight, I solved this problem by visiting the Affinity Store and logging in, and displaying all my available downloads under "My Account". I downloaded the .DMG files and, one at a time, launched them and moved the app to the Applications folder in the same location as the earlier version. The usual Mac "Verifying" dialog took its usual minute or so after the app had been extracted, whereupon I started the app and it loaded just fine, and its "About" dialog confirmed that it was now version 1.10. No further problems! Having backed up the latest version of the .DMG files, as I usually do, with their product keys, in the event of a serious problem I can re-install the apps with no fuss.

I had the same problem but had misread the solution given by MEB. When I checked macOS System Preferences' General tab, the number of Recents had been set to zero. Increasing it to 5 produced the result I was after.