Feature request: Third-party addons in addon manager

[benam]

Given that only addons purchased from the Affinity Store appear in the built in manager, it feels like a natural extension to allow addons from third-party merchants to be downloaded from the addon manager.

This has the benefits of being:

• More secure: file signing, secure downloads, tamper detection.
• Faster: no need to download a file and import it, all in one button press.
• DRM: You can ensure that the user has purchased that addon and it has been licenced to that user.
• Cheap: The only overhead for Serif that I can think of is linking the account to the application, as the merchant has to deal with content delivery.
• Integrated: There is only one place to get addons that are linked to the user's account. This also makes it easier for users on iPad to get addons (I don't have an iPad so I don't know how it's done there).

Lots of legwork with this has already been done, with the ability to already download addons from the Affinity Store implemented, and integration with Dropbox already existing. As this functionality is present, from an engineering standpoint, this means that less work has to be done. Presumably this is mostly backend work.

 

I envision this working something along these lines:

1. User purchases addon with 3^rd party merchant, which is linked to an account.
2. User links the merchant account with their Affinity account.
3. Application 'library' is synced with Affinity account.
4. User requests download from application.
5. Application makes file request to merchant, content is downloaded, and installed.

 

I think that this functionality will be a great improvement to be made to the application as a supplement to the already existing addon manager.