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That's why, when you release a roadmap, you wouldn't want to cast it as ironclad.
"The timeline, roadmap, and list of features shown here are preliminary in nature and subject to change based on many factors such as technical considerations, time considerations, economic conditions, corporate re-prioritization, and customer feedback. In no way are they to be construed as commitments."

For me, it depends on the immediacy of the need.  If we're using bitmap tracing as an example, that is not an immediate need for me.  If Serif says it's on the road map for Designer, that gives me some assurance that it will be coming, so I would be less hesitant to buy Designer and hope that Designer gets it before my need becomes more immediate.  On the other hand, if my need was immediate, I would look elsewhere.  But, then again, it depends.  If it's on the road map for Designer, then maybe I just look for an app that does bitmap tracing to fill the need until it's added to Designer.  If it's not on the road map, then maybe I would need to invest in some other illustration program entirely.  Or maybe I use two illustration programs, as I do with Designer and that other program that gets talked about here (that also does not have bitmap tracing despite its "hundreds" or "thousands" of features).

After Adobe went to subscription-only, I coasted on CS6 for a while and then switched to Affinity, and have never looked back. OK, well, I do fire up Photoshop every now and again for one reason or another, but overall I've been delighted with the Affinity products, and the value proposition they offer.
Market-wise, Serif's products lie in the middle of the huge gulf between expensive, rigid Adobe, and free, freewheeling open-source alternatives (GIMP, Inkscape, Scribus...). With respect to communication with users, I find myself wishing that Serif would lean more toward the behavior of open-source products.
Serif's communication is hit-or-miss. The v1 Beta programs did a good job giving users an insight into short-term plans for features and bug fixes. But this was all users could see in the way of a product roadmap. And the long gap between v1 and v2 with no public Beta left users in the dark for a very long time. For the most part, we were left guessing. Just the fact that there was a thread entitled "Is Affinity dead?" exemplifies that situation.
In the forums, Serif staff are very responsive to questions about bugs, existing features, and product behavior, which is absolutely wonderful.
On the other hand, my perception is that questions about Serif's short- or long-term plans, or even in some cases questions about existing policies, are greeted with a frustrating silence. 
Recent examples include the v1=>v2 upgrade pricing kerfuffles (there are two of them: one for longstanding v1 users, and one for recent v1 purchasers), the Windows msix installation debacle, and the aforementioned radio silence after 1.10.5.
Some of this secrecy might be justifiable (if somewhat cynically) for business reasons. For example, prospective first-time customers looking to buy Affinity v1 this past July might've been discouraged if they knew that v2 would be released in November, but they would have to pay the going rate for the upgrade. Or, if they learned that their hoped-for feature would not be implemented. So they might have chosen to hold off, impacting the timing and amount of revenue to Serif. 
However, for the most part, I am having trouble understanding the rationale for much of the secrecy. Seeing a product roadmap can be an incentive to buy into a product at an early stage. Maybe someone doesn't want to purchase Designer because they're not sure if there'll ever be a bitmap trace feature. If they see it on the roadmap, perhaps they'll take the plunge now, to start their transition. 
And most of us understand that there will be uncertainty. Even without a definitive answer, a response is superior to silence.
It's fine for Serif to say, "This is the fairly firm roadmap for v2.2 through v2.3, the tentative roadmap for 2.4-2.8, and the speculative feature set for v3. Any of this is still liable to change. Feedback welcome."
It would have been fine for Serif to say on the day after the v2 announcement, "We understand that some users have an issue with the MSIX installation. We're going to be discussing it among ourselves to determine what, if anything we will do in response. Stay tuned." It obviously would have been even better if the plans to use MSIX had been divulged months before announcement, since it would have better prepared Serif for release.
Posts like Ash's, which explain details surrounding the pricing and upgrade decisions, are fantastic, but IMO they could've been published MUCH earlier.
Most of the people who follow the forums, myself included, are committed Affinity users and supporters. We're going to be upgrading to v2, and we're very likely to pay again for v3. So I'm just not clear on what Serif gains by being so reticent to tell us what's going on, and what the plans are for the future.

😄 It’s nice to know I’m not the only one who prefers the iPad features/operation over the desktop version. I hope our Blue Bar returns soon!

Hey, walt. This is something I really want to have a debate about. I think all personas should be lined next to each other. How it was in v1 and how mrqasq here is asking for and the reason why I say that is because it makes it easier for the user to toggle between into each persona. These personas are very important. Users should be able to toggle into them easily with one tap. Now, users have to do 2 taps just to get to them. 2 taps slows workflow and it makes it less easy to toggle into them.
Heres the REAL issue though. Serif thought it was a good idea to put the context toolbar at the top on the same row the personas are on. Bad idea. That row at the top now becomes full of icons and these context toolbar icons now clash with the persona, document, and edit buttons. Because they clash, serif now has to make room for the context toolbar buttons and has put the personas into their own little single button pop up menu. This was a bad design choice by serif. This design choice makes the user do more work to get to important personas. This context toolbar ruins everything.
I hate the context tool bar at the top. It was fine at the bottom in v1 but serif said something about they needed to move the context toolbar because it was in the way of the users canvas. It was distracting so it was moved to the top. I truthfully believe that if serif wanted to put the context toolbar at the top, they should have made a second row and have this second row reserved for the context toolbar. THATS what should have happened.
That way the top row is reserved for all personas, the document, and edit buttons.  And then the context toolbar has its own row below for as many buttons it has. So now theres no button clashing going on and users can now 1 tap easily into their own personas.
On top of that, the top row where the personas,document, and edit buttons are should have been where the customizable toolbar should have gone. Its what users have been asking for years. Serif made a mistake by putting the context toolbar there instead of the customizable toolbar. And you know why the context toolbar at the top is a bad design decision? Its bad when not all the buttons of the context toolbar can fit on the bar at the top that you have to do a swipe left on the bar to see the rest of the buttons of the context toolbar that are hiding behind the zoom preview mode and snapping. Thats when you know its bad. 
So all personas should be displayed. No pop up menus for personas. The context toolbar should have gone on a second row below the top row. 

Make it dynamic. Would be less clicks when possible, and compacted when need be. Like less space available like your case. It's not impossible.
For me on PC with lower resolution it's also cluttered sometimes but things as important as personas are always visible.
Why we have this dualism in UX ? Things are ok somewhere and unacceptable elsewhere? I thought they aim to unify workflow. 
Better yet as I suggested somewhere else - give us option to customize toolbars and let everyone set like they want it instead forcing someone's opinion on all saying  'we know better'.
Or make double row at the top. Stop hiding features behind buttons. We have space, why not use it?
Wouldn't You agree?

Your "UI frustrations" are spot on. I was nodding in agreement reading that entire section.

While I am all with Serif for the huge undertaking they have been carrying on since years, I have to share Kal's frustration. What I can start to see with V2 is this:
- Photo and Designer are strong competitors to the Adobe equivalents. They still miss things, but do so many things well. AI features don't compel me. All considered, I was already mostly happy with the first version.
- Integration with the Mac's UI is even worse than before. This may seem a little thing for our fellows using Windows, but it is extremely important for us Mac users. We chose the difficult way of living out of the crowd because we love the comfort and elegance of that UI. Programs interfering with our lifelong meditation can't find good reception.
- While adding some extraordinary features, like side notes, and continuing to have the older, like live preview of changes, Publisher is very far from being an InDesign replacement. It can already be fine for someone working in isolation, but not for people working in a team or with collaborators, due to the lack of any way to be integrated in a production flux. It still lacks some fundamental things for long projects, like cross-references. It can't deal with RTL and CJK languages, that are all part of my everyday job. And then, there is the same issue of the application frame breaking the usefulness of the clean, multi-window Mac environment.
I was sincerely hoping to be able to finally trash InDesign in the next few months. But at this point I fear it will be several years away from now. The only two solutions, in the meantime, are to either keep a machine (real or virtual) with a current Mac OS just to use InDesign CS6, or to switch to InDesign CC. This latter solution repels me, since it would mean making all the forthcoming documents hostage of Adobe and its aleatory price and plan policies.
Not a great situation, in the freelance/small shops publishing world.
How bad I feel? I'm considering alternatives to using page layout software, entirely.
Paolo
 

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.

Exciting times. With precious little in the way of recent updates, some users wondered if Affinity was dead—but no, we were promptly told that they were just focused on the next major version. And four months later, here it is!
A common expression amongst users has been 'hopefully in version 2', so here's my list of hoped for changes. I'm about to fire up my new V2 apps for the first time and see if all the hopeful waiting has been rewarded. I've divided my list into two main categories: 'UI frustrations' and 'Missing or broken features'.
 
UI frustrations
Window management (Separated Mode)
Ever since MultiFinder appeared on the Mac in 1987, we've been able to run multiple apps and see their document windows side by side. Over the years came other improvements like drag and drop between apps and documents. You lose some of those benefits when an app takes up the whole screen with a solid background. For this reason, many of us preferred a separated workspace (turning off Application Frame in Adobe apps), but after switching to Affinity, quickly discovered that Affinity's Separated Mode was pretty broken, with document windows and Studio panels seemingly having no knowledge of each other's existence.
After much criticism, Affinity finally responded in June 2020 with a help article titled 'Increase your efficiency with Affinity’s Separated Mode'. There was no admission of any issues though, and I parodied the unhelpful article in this forum comment.
Changes in V2
Affinity seems to have finally acknowledged the issues with Separated Mode. Their solution? Remove it altogether! The new 'Float View to Window' command kind of gives us the worst of both worlds… separate windows that still aren't aware of your Studio panels, and a big old solid-grey app window obscuring every other background app. It looks like Affinity might have just put this one in the too hard basket.
Panel management
Resizing Studio panels in V1 is somewhere between painful and impossible. To be fair, this was never a perfect experience with Adobe either, but Affinity takes the pain to a new level. Can't see most of your Paragraph panel? Hover your cursor very carefully over that one-pixel hairline between panels… Nope, there's the 'no entry' cursor telling you the panel can't be resized (for some unknown reason). Double-click to minimise a panel or two to make more space… only to find that it added several inches of completely empty space to a different panel instead. Try to resize that one. Nope, there's the 'no entry' cursor again. Start double-clicking ALL the panels until you can finally see the one you want. Utter frustration.
Changes in V2
After playing around with panels for just a few minutes, the results are mixed. Firstly, I can resize panels (without seeing the 'no entry' icon all the time)—great! Secondly, the hover-zone seems to have expanded from one pixel to around two—I'll take it! Beyond that, things are still quite unpredictable. For example, I currently have a massive Swatches panel full of mostly empty space, and a tiny Text Styles panel below it which is showing me only two lines. I can resize the Text Styles panel to my liking, but if I then minimise and reopen it, it's right back to the way it was—tiny and useless. Whatever algorithm is determining these panel sizes is clearly not fit for purpose.
On a positive note, on the Mac the Studio panels are now listed under the Window menu—exactly where they should have been all along!
Oh one other thing… I lost the Swatches panel in Designer. As in, it just totally vanished. 😳 I can hide it and unhide it again from the menu, but it does not reappear. Restarting the app doesn't bring it back either. This could be a bit of a problem!! (Edit: Found!)
Working with guides
Creating a simple guide the normal way, by dragging out from the ruler, works fine. Unfortunately though, Affinity apps lack the power and flexibility of other drawing apps like Illustrator, which let you select and manipulate guides like normal objects—positioning them numerically for example, or hitting delete to remove then. Illustrator even lets you convert normal vector objects into guides.
With Affinity apps, you have to drag a guide off the edge of a page to remove it. The issues with this approach are (1) you have to be zoomed out so that you can see the edge of the page, and (2) it's inconsistent with the behaviour of other objects, which can be safely dragged and positioned beyond the edge of the page. This creates confusion for users as discussed on threads like this one.
Instead, Affinity gives us the Guides Manager. It's a useful tool, but it would be less necessary if guides were more flexible in the first place.
Changes in V2
There appears to be no changes to the way guides work in V2.
Working with colour swatches
In my opinion, Affinity seriously dropped the ball in V1 with the way colour swatches are handled. Here are some of the features that are missing or broken:
There's no obvious place to put your custom colours. You have to find the 'Add Document Palette' command first, which then creates something called 'Unnamed'. Other actions may trigger the app to add a second palette named 'Document'. Once a swatch is created, you can't convert it to or from a global or spot colour. You can't select more than one swatch at a time. You can't drag and drop colour swatches between palettes or between different parts of the UI. There's no obvious way to add a Pantone swatch to an existing document palette. (You need to apply the colour to an object on the canvas, select the object, switch back to your document palette and click on one of the two 'Add…' buttons.) New global colours are given generic names (Global Colour 1, etc). Pantone colour names are not preserved when added as global colours (the most common requirement!) and need to be typed in manually. Global colours are not transferred between documents when copying and pasting objects. (You need to explicitly export a palette from the first document and then import it into the second document.) Global spot colours are not added to a Publisher document palette when placing a Designer file (unlike InDesign and Illustrator). There's no search field in the 'Add Global Color' panel or edit colour pop-up, making it almost impossible to select the one you want from a large list of swatches. (They aren't displayed as a list, even if you set the panel appearance to 'Show as List'.) There's no command to find and delete unused swatches from a document palette. There's no option to merge two global colours. When deleting a used swatch, you're not asked what to replace it with. (If you delete a global colour, all instances just get replaced with a non-global version.) Yes, colour swatch management in Affinity V1 is bad—really bad. In one forum comment I wrote, 'That's one thing Adobe got right, and something the Affinity devs would have done well to replicate, rather than trying to get clever and do their own thing. Gosh I hope version 2 starts to take this seriously.' Well let's check out V2 and see…
Changes in V2
(1) The 'Add Document Palette' command now displays a pop-up which asks, 'Please enter a name for the new palette.' It still defaults to 'Unnamed', but it's a small improvement over the previous behaviour.
(9) Both the 'Add Global Color' panel and the edit colour pop-up now feature a search field, making it much easier to select from a large list of swatches. (They also now respect the 'Show as List' setting.)
Aside from those two improvements, very little seems to have changed with colour swatches across the Affinity suite. That's a big disappointment, and seems to communicates that the Affinity team don't share the view of many users, that this really needed an overhaul.
Undo/Redo
In Affinity apps, the action of selecting or deselecting an object gets added to the undo/redo stack. This is counterintuitive, goes against years of established practice, and (if the user is not familiar with it) can lead to data loss. Only an action that alters the artwork in some way should be added to the undo/redo stack, as discussed here.
Changes in V2
Nothing has changed.
 
Missing or broken features
1-bit black and white artwork (line art)
Graphics applications have, since the beginning of time, supported true 1-bit black and white artwork, so many professional users were understandably shocked to discover that Affinity V1 apps offered no support at all for 1-bit files. The only workaround is to work with grayscale and manually compress your lightness levels. This is anything but reliable, as compression algorithms at export time will not recognise the difference between a faux B&W image and a grayscale one, downsampling line art to an unacceptably low resolution and adding unwanted antialiasing.
Changes in V2
Incredibly, there's still no support for 1-bit black and white artwork.
Turning off antialiasing
The ability to turn off antialiasing of exported graphics is an essential feature for any professional graphics application. Affinity V1 apps lacked this feature entirely in the beginning, but in response to a forum post in 2015, one of Affinity's developers added highly-customisable, per-object control of antialiasing. Then, in 2020, it got better, with a simple on or off option, which you can apply to multiple objects at once.
This is a huge improvement already, but some of us would still like to see a simple on/off checkbox at export for outputting something like a raster print versions of a logo. As I explained in the same discussion: 'it's about tailoring the artwork to different output media. That should be an export function, not something I have to hard-code into the design file.'
Changes in V2
Turning off antialiasing cannot be done globally at export—it must still be hard-coded into each object of the file.
Reliably exporting for print
Affinity Publisher's default PDF export settings for print-ready artwork ('PDF (press-ready)') turns black (K:100) to a CMYK mix (e.g. C:71, M:66, Y:66, K:76), which would be a disaster if not detected before your job goes to print (something which is difficult when there are no pre-press tools provided). There are other issues too, like line art being downsampled and antialiased (related to the previous two issues).
Changes in V2
This has not been fixed. The 'PDF (press-ready)' export preset still has an all-or nothing 'Embed profiles' option ticked by default, and still causes black artwork (like text) to get converted to a CMYK mix.
Previewing colour separations
Affinity has no alternative to Acrobat Pro. For print professionals, this means no way of previewing and checking colour separations before going to print. When combined with the issues mentioned above, the chances of poor quality artwork and printing are high.
Changes in V2
There are no new apps or built-in tools for checking colour separations.
 
Summary
V2 may have brought some cool new features, but it has only brought modest improvements to a few of the features which matter to me the most, while other issues have been overlooked completely. Having waited so many years for the first major update, I have to say, I'm pretty disappointed.
I'll still purchase all the apps, and I'll still recommend them to family and friends. They do a lot of great things, and you certainly can't beat the price.
Of course, this is not an exhaustive list of the issues I have with the Affinity apps—just a few that frustrate me the most. If I've left out some of your biggest issues, feel free to add them below with a note on whether V2 fixed them for you.

At work, we use Adobe. I am loving being able to use variable fonts in Indesign.
At home, I use Affinity. I want variable fonts! Especially since some of my favourite families are being updated as variable fonts.
It’s time.

More than a year has passed, Google Fonts now supports variable fonts. It is time Serif team @Dave Harris.

So… how do you justify the presence of a “Snap to Baseline Grid” option in the snapping manager, then…? That seems a bit weird, to say the least.
Still, my suggestion still holds. It's already there, and if it works… I know Designer isn't a DTP app, but for light, single-page work, such as academic posters, I could totally see myself using Designer instead of Publisher (especially some vector-heavy ones). In fact, I make one or two every year in Illustrator, and I do miss having baseline grids, so… yeah.
If this is a feature segmentation decision to avoid cannibalisation, or to keep the software simpler, at least tuck the option somewhere else, like a menu item (e.g. under Text > Baseline > Baseline manager), or as an extra tab under the Grid and Snapping Axis manager, or something. And restrict it to Publisher owners, as you already do with its own Designer and Photo personas, if you must. I understand you may want to avoid feature bloat, but it's already in the code base. Removing it/omitting it just feels… petty, and… almost Adobe-like, if I must say so. You guys keep disappointing me more and more, I can't believe this.

A lack of a roadmap (before anyone asks, I know why it was removed) or a priority list (what I’d prefer) does not give clear communication to anyone on the outside looking in. There’s no reasoning as to why certain features are/aren’t made, what milestones to get to certain features, why development seems slow, etc. There’s a lot of “We’re listening!” but not a lot of “Here’s what we’re up to/no longer up to and why.” So much of communication is just about being transparent.
I don’t care if they veto some popular request so long as we’re not left guessing as to why. And without a central place to discuss this (like a roadmap of sorts – you don’t even need to give out dates!) the same requests are going to keep popping up. 

To add to my previous comment, I don’t like paying for Adobe but please, take a look at their apps’ uservoice forums. They have a section for active-indevelopment features. They never give dates, only a heads up to say, “Hey we have this feature in dev now.” or, “What is your workflow like?” That’s all that’s needed. 
 

To add to my previous comment, I don’t like paying for Adobe but please, take a look at their apps’ uservoice forums. They have a section for active-indevelopment features. They never give dates, only a heads up to say, “Hey we have this feature in dev now.” or, “What is your workflow like?” That’s all that’s needed. 
 

To add to my previous comment, I don’t like paying for Adobe but please, take a look at their apps’ uservoice forums. They have a section for active-indevelopment features. They never give dates, only a heads up to say, “Hey we have this feature in dev now.” or, “What is your workflow like?” That’s all that’s needed. 
 

To add to my previous comment, I don’t like paying for Adobe but please, take a look at their apps’ uservoice forums. They have a section for active-indevelopment features. They never give dates, only a heads up to say, “Hey we have this feature in dev now.” or, “What is your workflow like?” That’s all that’s needed. 
 

A lack of a roadmap (before anyone asks, I know why it was removed) or a priority list (what I’d prefer) does not give clear communication to anyone on the outside looking in. There’s no reasoning as to why certain features are/aren’t made, what milestones to get to certain features, why development seems slow, etc. There’s a lot of “We’re listening!” but not a lot of “Here’s what we’re up to/no longer up to and why.” So much of communication is just about being transparent.
I don’t care if they veto some popular request so long as we’re not left guessing as to why. And without a central place to discuss this (like a roadmap of sorts – you don’t even need to give out dates!) the same requests are going to keep popping up. 

I miss the pattern tool in Illustrator. +1

To add to my previous comment, I don’t like paying for Adobe but please, take a look at their apps’ uservoice forums. They have a section for active-indevelopment features. They never give dates, only a heads up to say, “Hey we have this feature in dev now.” or, “What is your workflow like?” That’s all that’s needed. 
 

A lack of a roadmap (before anyone asks, I know why it was removed) or a priority list (what I’d prefer) does not give clear communication to anyone on the outside looking in. There’s no reasoning as to why certain features are/aren’t made, what milestones to get to certain features, why development seems slow, etc. There’s a lot of “We’re listening!” but not a lot of “Here’s what we’re up to/no longer up to and why.” So much of communication is just about being transparent.
I don’t care if they veto some popular request so long as we’re not left guessing as to why. And without a central place to discuss this (like a roadmap of sorts – you don’t even need to give out dates!) the same requests are going to keep popping up. 

To add to my previous comment, I don’t like paying for Adobe but please, take a look at their apps’ uservoice forums. They have a section for active-indevelopment features. They never give dates, only a heads up to say, “Hey we have this feature in dev now.” or, “What is your workflow like?” That’s all that’s needed. 
 

To add to my previous comment, I don’t like paying for Adobe but please, take a look at their apps’ uservoice forums. They have a section for active-indevelopment features. They never give dates, only a heads up to say, “Hey we have this feature in dev now.” or, “What is your workflow like?” That’s all that’s needed. 
 

To add to my previous comment, I don’t like paying for Adobe but please, take a look at their apps’ uservoice forums. They have a section for active-indevelopment features. They never give dates, only a heads up to say, “Hey we have this feature in dev now.” or, “What is your workflow like?” That’s all that’s needed.