Hello!
I updated the whole Affinity suite to 1.9 and Publisher, Designer and Photo now crashes right on splash screen. You really should put more effort to testing before publishing. Here are the exact infos of env:
Affinity version: Windows 1.9.0.932
CPU: Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-6200U CPU
GPU: Nvidia Geforce 1060
Memory: 8 Gb
OS: Windows 10 Pro 19042.746 / 20H2
EP: 120.2212.551.0
If you see Photo, Designer and Publisher just briefly show the the startup screens and then crash after updating to 1.9, try updating the graphics drivers, especially if you have a notebook with an integrated Intel graphics card. Solved the issue for me.