Designer Files no longer associated with Designer

[R C-R]

40 minutes ago, emptyful said:

I also have folders with identical icons in my iCloud Drive for both designer and Photo. Things are weird. (see image)

That is weird, but IIIRC a few other users have reported the same thing. Unfortunately, I don't remember the fix, or if there was one.

29 minutes ago, emptyful said:

I have another .afdesign file who's icon appears in the Affinity Designer folder on my iCloud drive, but the file itself is actually in my Documents folder (also on the iCloud Drive - notice how you can just see the "In Documents" note beneath the filename? I'm guessing that's a symlink or alias or some such, right?)

I think it must be an alias (or possibly a symlink) because of the "Show Original" item in the Finder's contextual menu.

Regardless, for the two iCloud Drive folders with the Affinity logos, ignoring for the moment their identical icons, those folders & their icon 'badges' should have been created automatically by iOS itself when saving an afdesign or afphoto document on an iPad running the iPad version of the respective app if the iPad app's general preference "Default Save Location" is set to "iCloud Drive." As I understand it, this is a limitation imposed by the sandboxing in iOS that Affinity can't do anything about. IOW, users can't create either of those two folders manually on an iPad; only iOS can do that.

This is where it gets really confusing. From what I can tell, if an affinity native format file (regardless of its extension) is saved from either iPad app to that app's respective default iCloud Drive save location, then somehow it is flagged so the macOS Finder will not allow 'Open with' to be changed to the other Affinity app. (I assume this has something to do with iOS sandboxing, but that is just a guess.) However, nothing prevents a user from saving an afdesign or afphoto (or any other) file type to either of those folders from a Mac, & for those afdesign & afphoto files, users can change "Open with" in the Finder's Info window.

So basically, this is (I think!) "as designed," not by Affinity but by Apple. 

[emptyful]

I think I'm smellin' what your steppin' in, R C-R. Thanks for your help.

[McCoy Appleseed]

I have been experiencing the exact same problem and it's killing me. The iCloud Drive folder for both Designer and Photo have a Photo icon; all of the files within these two folders automatically open in Photo; and I cannot change the default app for these files. No beta versions installed except for the Publisher beta. I have uninstalled and reinstalled all of the 3 apps (Designer, Photo, and Publisher) multiple times, and I even cleared the system's launch service files tonight. Still no progress.