Affinity for Android

[itContinues]

4 hours ago, Amnesiac said:

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).  

 

Yes and no. In the past, their anti-piracy was trivial, and honestly, it made me stick to their software for years. And I know I am not the only one. As soon as I started designing ads for a living, I bought the license and paid the monthly fee. Their software was trivial to pirate in the past - which is not the primary reason it is the Design Suite of choice nowadays - but it certainly didn't hurt them much.

Honestly, there is a bit of a chicken and, e.g. problem on Android. There aren't many exceptional design apps on the platform; however, Samsung is making more exceptional hardware for designing/drawing/etc. At the moment, I am using Infinite Painter and Design on my Tab S9, which are fine. Not great, just fine. Krita does the job but is primarily a simple desktop port and doesn't have an excellent UI for tablets. Which means I don't use it. There are a few more apps. But most of these are ad-supported garbage or straight garbage. When you look at the Adobe forums, there are hundreds of posts, each with hundreds of replies requesting Android versions of the iPad apps. There is quite a bit of demand for it. Because, at best, only 1% of potential users will actively request something from a developer.

I don't blame Serif for not creating Android apps yet (hopefully). The business/team isn't close to the size of Adobe's. However, I blame Adobe for not leaving their earlier drawing apps on Android. Their actions, in this case, told their Android users to piss off by just deleting their existing apps. It's one of the reasons I started looking elsewhere for my design needs.

I won't switch back to iPads because I'm not particularly eager to work with iPad OS and its overpriced ecosystem. Samsung hardware is not cheap, but it's more feature-complete right out of the box. 

Anyway, thank you for your comment and have a great day.

[OriolFM]

13 hours ago, itContinues said:

Yes and no. In the past, their anti-piracy was trivial, and honestly, it made me stick to their software for years. And I know I am not the only one. As soon as I started designing ads for a living, I bought the license and paid the monthly fee. Their software was trivial to pirate in the past - which is not the primary reason it is the Design Suite of choice nowadays - but it certainly didn't hurt them much.

Honestly, there is a bit of a chicken and, e.g. problem on Android. There aren't many exceptional design apps on the platform; however, Samsung is making more exceptional hardware for designing/drawing/etc. At the moment, I am using Infinite Painter and Design on my Tab S9, which are fine. Not great, just fine. Krita does the job but is primarily a simple desktop port and doesn't have an excellent UI for tablets. Which means I don't use it. There are a few more apps. But most of these are ad-supported garbage or straight garbage. When you look at the Adobe forums, there are hundreds of posts, each with hundreds of replies requesting Android versions of the iPad apps. There is quite a bit of demand for it. Because, at best, only 1% of potential users will actively request something from a developer.

I don't blame Serif for not creating Android apps yet (hopefully). The business/team isn't close to the size of Adobe's. However, I blame Adobe for not leaving their earlier drawing apps on Android. Their actions, in this case, told their Android users to piss off by just deleting their existing apps. It's one of the reasons I started looking elsewhere for my design needs.

I won't switch back to iPads because I'm not particularly eager to work with iPad OS and its overpriced ecosystem. Samsung hardware is not cheap, but it's more feature-complete right out of the box. 

Anyway, thank you for your comment and have a great day.

Well, I use Clip Studio Paint to draw on my Tab S8 Ultra. Their app is very streamlined. You can do almost 100% of what you can do on the PC version, and they have the full UI, plus a simplified UI for sketching/painting without so many options (and you can switch quickly between them). You can also use your Android phone as a companion to the tablet and use it to display part of the UI (colour/brush selection or menu options, for instance, without any additional cost).

That's a really well-thought, useful app, from a medium-sized company, that does one thing and does it very well. For Android, PC, Mac, and iOS.

[Amnesiac]

On 2/14/2024 at 11:44 AM, OriolFM said:

Well, I use Clip Studio Paint to draw on my Tab S8 Ultra. Their app is very streamlined. You can do almost 100% of what you can do on the PC version, and they have the full UI, plus a simplified UI for sketching/painting without so many options (and you can switch quickly between them). You can also use your Android phone as a companion to the tablet and use it to display part of the UI (colour/brush selection or menu options, for instance, without any additional cost).

That's a really well-thought, useful app, from a medium-sized company, that does one thing and does it very well. For Android, PC, Mac, and iOS.

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.

[Amnesiac]

On 2/13/2024 at 9:51 PM, itContinues said:

When you look at the Adobe forums, there are hundreds of posts, each with hundreds of replies requesting Android versions of the iPad apps. There is quite a bit of demand for it. Because, at best, only 1% of potential users will actively request something from a developer.

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.

On 2/13/2024 at 9:51 PM, itContinues said:

Anyway, thank you for your comment and have a great day.

Thank you for yours in return - and I did thanks :-)

 

[Edited out some typos]

[itContinues]

7 hours ago, Amnesiac said:

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.

Yeah.. I don't use Clip because I do not like their pricing model and I do not like the software enough to deal with it. I didn't leave Adobe to go go back into a similar pricing model.I. went for Affinity because of theirs even which I think is a model that is more fair.

[OriolFM]

Canva Acquisition might change things a bit... they have Android versions (subscription-based, though).

[donka]

16 minutes ago, OriolFM said:

Canva Acquisition might change things a bit... they have Android versions (subscription-based, though).

My fear that Affinity ends up subscription based.

[OriolFM]

Since it's what Canva does, that's definitely their endgame.

Again, I would be willing to pay a reasonable subscription plan for Affinity (let's say, 8-10€ per month, if it comes with unlimited updates and additional features, it's roughly the same as buying a good program every year or two).

But still, when you buy a new program every year or two, you can keep using it if you don't like the new version, which is probably what I'll do for the moment, until I see what's coming up and I decide if it's worth it or not.