Affinity Designer on iPad has become unusable

[Bluerose]

Unable of doing several operations, buttons not responding, tools not working… crashes. When I finally manage to export some half done work, those exports must be corrupted, cause they cause Procreate or any other photo/drawing app to crash. 

This has been going on for months, and I saw it gradually becoming worse and worse.

Apart from that, we once were promised a more user friendly version without the steep learning curve and the fairly “stubborn” behavior.

To me it looks like Affinity is not keeping up with iOS. I wander, is Affinity for iPad a dead project? 

I am very disappointed and considering Adobe products. 

[Callum]

Hi Bluerose,

Welcome to the forums

I'm sorry to hear the iPad version of our apps aren't working well for you. Please could you tell me which iPad you are using and how many documents roughly you have open on the apps home screen?

Thanks
C

[awakenedbyowls]

Is this something to do with the latest iOS update? I remember this happened one time before after an update. 

Sorry I just can't work with constantly unstable software!

Going to carry on and hope it doesn't crash on me again..

[Bowzer]

Updates Very Few & Far Between

I brought this app 2 years ago as I was looking for a reliable app to use on my iPad day to day for my job as a designer. I found Affinity Designer of the iPad and was impressed with the tools and functions as I had transitioned over from Adobe Illustrator on the desktop. My joy of finding a decent workhorse for my vector designs was to be short lived. As I used the app I started to experience more bugs. I did report the bugs, taking screen shots and recordings, sending them on through. The were some issues that I could work though however there were some issues that were obviously common place as I found out from the forum. I send the hardcore issues though to be told, “thank you, we’ve sent them through to the dev team”. 2 years later and I find I’m here writing to you, saddened that what is an app with a lot of potential is going to the dogs. I posted my concerns on the forum and have found that there are many, many users fed up with the comment, “thank you, we’ve sent you concerns on through to the dev team”, only to find….nothing gets fixed, or in a hurry anyway. I paid for this app and I feel like I’ve been ripped off. 2 updates in 2 years is a joke. If you are considering buying this app, you will love the tools and options within but you will become increasingly frustrated as your concerns will fall on deaf ears. THERE SHOULD BE SOME ACCOUNTABILITY FOR UFATES TO APPS ON THE APP STORE. Serif Affinity you should be ashamed!

[awakenedbyowls]

I've not experienced any more issues with it crashing on the iPad Air - hopefully the other day was an isolated incident and won't happen again - but since this is the second time I'm having issues like this following an iOS update I'm having to constantly save for fear of losing work 

There's something in the settings where you can set it to autosave and the most frequent setting is "30" which I think means 30 minutes and not seconds? Be good if that was a bit clearer in app. Be good if it could be set to autosave every minute maybe too?

I hope the dev team can fix any issues relating to crashing and restore my confidence that I am using an app I can rely on not to lose any progress, because there's nothing worse than having to go over the same things again. I don't want to switch to another software because I'm used to this one now and I like it

[Alfred]

2 hours ago, awakenedbyowls said:

There's something in the settings where you can set it to autosave and the most frequent setting is "30" which I think means 30 minutes and not seconds? Be good if that was a bit clearer in app. Be good if it could be set to autosave every minute maybe too?

The default autosave value is 300, not 30. It’s clearly 300 seconds, or five minutes: 300 minutes (i.e. five hours) would be much too long to be of any practical use! The ‘Autosave Interval’ control can be found under ‘Preferences > General’.

[awakenedbyowls]

23 minutes ago, Alfred said:

The default autosave value is 300, not 30. It’s clearly 300 seconds, or five minutes: 300 minutes (i.e. five hours) would be much too long to be of any practical use! The ‘Autosave Interval’ control can be found under ‘Preferences > General’.

I didn't say 30 was the default value - I said it was the most frequent

I tested it last night on 30 (which I thought was 30s) and it wasn't saving stuff I'd done in the last 5-10 minutes - so to be 100% safe I'm just saving manually and occasionally saving a copy under a different name

That's why I assumed it was in minutes! Because it didn't autosave..

[Alfred]

18 minutes ago, awakenedbyowls said:

I didn't say 30 was the default value - I said it was the most frequent

I tested it last night on 30 (which I thought was 30s) and it wasn't saving stuff I'd done in the last 5-10 minutes - so to be 100% safe I'm just saving manually and occasionally saving a copy under a different name

That's why I assumed it was in minutes! Because it didn't autosave..

Thanks for the clarification! For whatever it’s worth, I’ve never liked relying on autosave in any software product: if it kicks in on schedule, it often does so at the most inconvenient moment.

Doing a manual ‘Save’ or ‘Save As…’ is much better. It gives you complete control over resaving the project, meaning that you can choose if and how to save after any major changes (regardless of whether that’s after 3 minutes or 30).

[awakenedbyowls]

Just now, Alfred said:

Thanks for the clarification! For whatever it’s worth, I’ve never liked relying on autosave in any software product: if it kicks in on schedule, it often does so at the most inconvenient moment.

Doing a manual ‘Save’ or ‘Save As…’ is much better. It gives you complete control over resaving the project, meaning that you can choose if and how to save after any major changes (regardless of whether that’s after 3 minutes or 30).

Yes - the thing is about autosave is I don't know when it's saving - it would be useful if it alerted me somehow when it was doing it - so I knew for sure it was doing it

[DM1]

Affinity makes a working copy of the active document in sandbox and works on that copy. Autosave only updates that working copy. Save updates the original file (if you used Open…. and not Import ). 
It’s hard to tell if autosave works as returning to the Home/Project screen via back arrow causes the saving of the working copy anyway. Autosave ‘should’ be helpful in the event of a unexpected shutdown where you haven’t manually returned to the Home Screen. Unfortunately those types of shutdowns can corrupt the working copy resulting in it not being able to be opened anymore.

As Alfred suggests, Use the manual Save and use it often😁.

[awakenedbyowls]

Haven't experienced any further issues with crashing but there seems to be some constant glitch I'm experiencing. I'm not sure if it's something I'm doing, however the frequency with which it's happening is suspicious.

I'm constantly finding when I'm working that it keeps changing what tools I have selected - like if I'm using the Node Tool it will suddenly flick to the Move Tool (even though I haven't selected it) or I'm using the Brush Tool in Pixel Mode and it'll suddenly switch to the Eraser? I'm using a drawing glove so can't see how I'm accidentally hitting something.

Anyone else finding this? It's really irritating and I hope the developers can iron things out with whatever big update they are working on.