System interface initialization takes almost a minute

[Jaroslav]

Hi,

this is something few other guys probably mentioned already, but I guess there is still no way to solve this. 

I am using all three Affinity apps for few months, and Designer since MacOS Catalina. Currently I am using Affinity apps on both Intel based Macbook PRO 2017, and since January also on M1 Mac Mini 16GB 500GB version. Launching Affinity designer on MacOS Big Sur during it's developer/public betas was great, and Affinity launched (at least for me) in matter of seconds. But since release of Big Sur (at least from what I remember) Affinity Designer (haven't been using others before) the app takes too much time to open (at first). I thought that it was caused because of my 2017 Macbook PRO, but still the Adobe Photoshop, or Matlab, Xcode, Lightroom etc. took quite normal and much shorter time to launch. So I bought M1 Mac Mini 16GB (in hope for much faster speeds - which it delivered in all categories except launching Affinity apps). I love your apps, and I've been using it for work very and never looked back on Adobe, except the first app launch time (and well some missing features from Illustrator). 

So yesterday I tried to analyze app launch through Apple Instruments kit, and the results are quite sad, and to be honest I quite don't understand why it takes so long.

As shown in the screenshot, I the time consuming part of app launch is "System interface initialization of frameworks" which takes 52.76 seconds. This is the exact time when the app icon is bouncing in the Dock...After that the app launching dialog window appears. 

I know that you keep saying that this happens only during first launch of the app after booting up the Mac/Computer, but hey guys...Honestly. Who is opening the app the second time? All what matters is the first time. And honestly sometimes I feel embarassed when I open the app in front of someone who is using Adobe pack, even more if it's Windows PC user, and they keep asking it all apps take more than minute to open on the Mac... What they don't...Most apps open in milliseconds/seconds.

I am still searching for my own solving. I tried using different accounts, tried to relocate app folder to another locations, tried unplugging the Mac from the internet, etc. etc. ... Nothing helped.

I hope there will be a solution in the future for solving this. 

If there are any updates of tips for this, I would be very glad to know.

Thank you.

Regards.

Jaroslav

[Dan C]

Hi @Jaroslav,

Welcome to the Affinity forums

I can confirm this is a known issue with the 1.9 versions of Affinity on Big Sur and our developers are working hard in conjunction with Apple to resolve this as soon as possible.

As we understand it, the following is the reason for this delay -

It has been confirmed that the beta versions of the apps are not affected by this, so we're still unsure why the same checks slow our retail build and not beta versions - 

We hope to have this fixed ASAP as we understand how inconvenient it is. I hope this clears things up!