Problem with Affinity Photo on iPad...

[PooPsTech]

Hi there,

I just got an iPad Pro and I wanted to purchase Affinity photo at the Apple Appstore and when I read the comments, they are mostly bad and people report many crashes.  What is going on?  Are you fixing these problems?

Edited April 27, 2020 by PooPsTech
typos

[disjecta]

I’ve been using Affinity Photo on my iPad Pro for almost a year now and I think it crashed twice in all that time. For me at least, it has been a solid app.

[Alewan]

All Affinity apps crash once in a while. It helps to enable auto-save, and also I try to think about closing/reopening the document I'm working with after I make major changes that I wouldn't want to lose (this is how you force a Save).

Not sure all crashes are their fault, maybe this is iPadOS killing random apps to regain memory. It's still a major annoyance, though.

[Alewan]

Just now, Alewan said:

All Affinity apps crash once in a while. It helps to enable auto-save, and also I try to think about closing/reopening the document I'm working with after I make major changes that I wouldn't want to lose (this is how you force a Save).

Not sure all crashes are their fault, maybe this is iPadOS killing random apps to regain memory. It's still a major annoyance, though.

To be complete, I do not regret my purchase despite these crashes, I still recommend their apps, and will probably buy their new apps in the future.

The only complaint I have is that the apps are not updated as often as I'd like, though I believe this would require them to switch to a “subscription” model and I can see many will be angry if they did.

[NewAffinity]

I am getting big squares of blank pixels appearing all over any image I open in Affinity Photo on my ipad now.  The squares have no pixels in them and move around randomly through any file/image I open. Especially when I move the image, change the view or try to use any tool; so basically if I try to do anything.  I’m not sure what to do or who one speaks to?  

 I can’t do any editing/work at all in affinity now.

[Paul Mudditt]

42 minutes ago, NewAffinity said:

I am getting big squares of blank pixels appearing all over any image I open in Affinity Photo on my ipad now.  The squares have no pixels in them and move around randomly through any file/image I open. Especially when I move the image, change the view or try to use any tool; so basically if I try to do anything.  I’m not sure what to do or who one speaks to?  

 I can’t do any editing/work at all in affinity now.

Close all apps down then perform a forced restart, press volume up then volume down in quick succession then press and hold the power button until you see the apple logo.

 

https://support.apple.com/en-gb/guide/ipad/ipad63d30b5a/ios

[NewAffinity]

Thank you!  It worked.  I ‘closed’ some image files on affinity photo.  Then turned ipad off and on again.  Then opened previously saved version of the image file from my ipad files.  All good again.  THANK GOD!  And thank you!  I honestly thought I’d lost all that work   But all good again  

[NewAffinity]

It seems that affinity photo on ipad can get kinda ‘overwhelmed’?  It seems to have a limited RAM? Is this because I’m using it on an ipad?  It’s an iPad Pro and only 1 year old so I’m surprised.

[Blende21]

An iPad runs with a max of 6GB RAM even on the latest, largest iPad Pro (if you follow the 3rd party tests, Apple does not comment).

Most People who are seriously editing photos will have 16, 32 or more RAM on their computers, plus often a dedicated GPU with more and special RAM.

Affinity works fine on the iPad, but there are Limits. If you want to work on very large projects like Panos or a lot of layers, you will probably test these limits. With a normal editing use on my iPad Pro 10.5 / 512GB with 4GB of RAM I never had problems.

If you want to see more, there is a free app called System Guard that will show the total RAM and how it is used.

[Paul Mudditt]

After over ten years with iPads, it’s the iPad itself that is vulnerable. Being a portable device it is subjected to lots of static electricity shocks and that can upset the hardware or even flip the state of flash memory bits. This is why turning off then on, or doing a forced restart now and again is worthwhile to re-initialise hardware and memory locations. At worst a full restore from backup may occasionally  be required. Affinity uses the iPad hardware to its full so inevitably will be prone to occasional problems because of this.

[Carson]

It’s an iPad, one of the most amazing machines on this planet along with the iPhone. Enough use doing anything will start to discombobulate the memory on these small and very compact devices and as we know, the Affinity Photo app is beautifully massive. I’ll usually reboot before starting work in Affinity and don’t have problems. Can’t do without an iPad and Affinity Photo anymore. 

[Blende21]

@Paul Mudditt Good point, to remind of starting it up fresh from time to time.

Android and iOS allocate memory very differently: Android uses a dynamic allocation, where RAM stays allocated even when an app is already closed.  The CPU is constantly reallocating RAM. I have read somewhere that Android devices use up to 1/3 of their computing power to manage RAM allocation.

iOS apps reserve the RAM they need, and liberate it on closing. Much more elegant, and a reason why iOS devices perform better with fewer resources compared to Android.

The downside is if an app does not handle it correctly, or leaves RAM blocked, there is no cleaning team to sort it out. This cleaning of system resources happens when shutting the iOS device. After the restart, it often feels that the brakes are off now.

One can argue that currently with an iOS-Update every week (at least it feels like every week) there is no need to restart it manually. But if an iPad is running out of memory, shutting it down and restart it often helps to sort it out.