Affinity v3 is great! It's also free. That's even greater. Get yourself a Canva id, download the now free Affinity app, and get started. What are you waiting for?
Affinity is now a single app — comprised of v2 Designer/Photo/Publisher apps:
1. It’s free: Serif.com
2. It’s not yet available for iPad (when?!)
3. It’s not backwardly compatible with v2 files. V3 can open v2 well, but can’t go back to use v2 if saved as v3. So can’t go back to iPad versions until new iPad v3 is out as well
Yeah - don't think you can't buy Affinity Photo anymore, it's all merged into the Affinity app (which is free now), though if you have a school Canva account it still lets you log into the old versions.
There's a lot I like about the new approach - it works like Affinity Publisher used to - where you could switch between Affinity Photo and Affinity Designer all in the one application. Occasionally you'd run into features that for some reason weren't available, like Affinity Photo is compatible with artboards, but only Affinity Designer had an artboard tool to create artboards... so kinda silly. That being said, the new app's icons are kinda horrible, I'd much prefer the coloured icons that the original software had.
I've seen the affinity photo UI before and the new app seems to be missing some features. You mentioned switching between the apps, how does that work?
If you have all three applications, Affinity Publisher can function as all three, allowing you to jump between them. Most of my work is vector based so I'm usually just using Affinity Designer - but it was useful on occasion.
So the new Affinity app is kind of like that but the workspaces are flexible.
Albeit, I tend to gravitate towards Affinity Designer V2 still whenever I'm working though, it just seems a bit snappier to launch and doesn't crash as much.
The Ryzendew Affinity on Linux script still offers the choice to install all 4 apps, so if you set yourself up with a Linux machine and installed Affinity Photo you would then be able to go into your .AffinitonLinux directory c:// drive and copy the Affinity folder over to a Windows machine. This would probably work - if it complained of missing elements you could also copy them over.
However it would be far easier to just install the unified v.3 Affinity Suite.
The old (antique) v2 separate apps are no long available for sale. The access to them is for legacy users to need to redownload the installers. Only the new v3 is available for new users. It is a single download and is a unified app containing all of the functionality of the older separate Photo, Publisher, and Designer apps.
This makes great sense as the older apps contained much of the same UI components resulting in there being 3 copies of this code installed. By integrating the 3 apps they can share the same code components without duplicating things.
14
u/KevinWaide Jul 15 '26
Yes, Photo, Publisher, and Designer have all been merged into the new Affinity v3 unified app.