Provide separate Intel and Apple Silicon builds instead of a single, universal binary.

[Guest]

I'm hoping this might already be on your roadmap for v2, but if not providing users with the option of separate Intel and Apple Silicon builds instead universal binaries would be most welcome, especially for folks whose disk space may be a precious commodity. Blender, Visual Studio Code, GitHub, and many other companies are now distributing smaller, chip specific binaries—and their app sizes are nothing compared to the Affinity suite.

I realize you probably need a universal build for the App Store, but if you could provide separate binaries for folks purchasing directly from you that would be yet another incentive to purchase the macOS apps from you directly.

[MikeTO]

I don't think the files are that big compared to the other guys.

• Affinity Photo 1.10 = 2.65GB
• Adobe Photoshop 2022 = 4.72GB

 

[v_kyr]

13 minutes ago, MikeTO said:

I don't think the files are that big compared to the other guys.

Compare instead with previous none fat binary APh versions!

Though one can of course also lipo fat/universal binaries afterwards ...

 

[Petar Petrenko]

On 10/6/2022 at 10:50 PM, MikeTO said:

Affinity Photo 1.10 = 2.65GB

PhotoLine 60 MB.

[MikeTO]

3 minutes ago, NNN said:

PhotoLine 60 MB.

I've never heard of PhotoLine but based on the file size it's built the old-fashioned way, everything must be written from scratch. Most apps are large now because file size as storage and bandwidth grew developers started optimizing for others things. Building an app now is like plugging together pieces, some of which you don't write yourself. This increases development speed and decreases bugs but leads to larger file sizes.

[MikeTO]

22 minutes ago, NNN said:

PhotoLine 60 MB.

Also, Affinity is fully packaged and supports multiple languages. The help system embedded in Affinity Photo 1.10.5 on macOS is 130.6 MB, double the size of the entire PhotoLine app. I think it's more important to have a great help system that is available offline than it is to reduce the file size.

I developed software in the old days and we had to keep things small because we distributed it on floppies and the app had to run in very limited memory. If I was building those apps now I wouldn't worry at all about file size.

[Petar Petrenko]

9 minutes ago, MikeTO said:

Also, Affinity is fully packaged and supports multiple languages. The help system embedded in Affinity Photo 1.10.5 on macOS is 130.6 MB, double the size of the entire PhotoLine app. I think it's more important to have a great help system that is available offline than it is to reduce the file size.

I developed software in the old days and we had to keep things small because we distributed it on floppies and the app had to run in very limited memory. If I was building those apps now I wouldn't worry at all about file size.

Hey, I didn't say anything against Affinity. All of this was about the apps sizes.

[AdamStanislav]

8 hours ago, NNN said:

I didn't say anything against Affinity.

Nobody said you did. Mike just explained why Affinity software is much bigger than the other one.

[Bryan Rieger]

Just bumping this request again as installing the beta apps makes this issue of bloat all the more visible.

If you could make two separate installers for Windows with v2, why not split the macOS binaries into Universal, Intel and Apple Silicon builds, especially for users that bought the apps directly from Serif? It may seem like an insignificant request, after all, just buy more HD space—but as it's often not possible to upgrade MacBook storage, being a little more respectful of user resources goes a long, long way.

Yes, I can use lipo to strip the Intel binaries, but I'd much rather be running officially supported builds rather than one I've modified.