Affinity Studio now free

I feel like everyone is very negative about something that hasn't happened yet. This gives a desktop environment to Canva users, where the revenue actually is. It's both a trojan horse and a usable product. Will everyone's worse fears come true? Maybe, maybe not. Mean time you have an excellent app, for free, and very few software products, free, open source, closed source, perpetual, subscription.... last "forever". They are often obsoleted by some new product, new workflow or just a new OS. Take it for what it is right now.

> Will everyone's worse fears come true?

Yes, they will. Enshittification is a constant and is driven by misaligned investment incentives to that of good products.

The new version is a nice update over v2, with some great new features.

The downside is that some useful features like background removal will never come to the non-subscription version. OTOH, the subscription is cheap if you think of it as license cost for an Adobe alternative.

> Will everyone's worse fears come true?

I mean, it's sort of inevitable. Eventually, Canva will find itself under pressure to grow revenue (or even just weather a downturn). The maintenance of a complex desktop application is expensive and there will be pressure to increase "conversions" by putting more and more of the useful functions behind a paywall.

That said, their immediate goal is probably to take away customers from Adobe, and right now, the product is free, has more features than the old Affinity, doesn't need to talk to activation servers on an ongoing basis, and doesn't auto-update. So we should enjoy it while it lasts.

It’s already happened: when trying to download, I can’t sign up for “security reasons”.

This never happened to me when getting something from the AppStore, or from anyone else really. And that’s the problem with cloudgarbage, you have zero control over it.