On Canva's Surprise Affinity Acquisition—What Even Is an App Anymore?

Canva, the app that everyone uses to make cool posters, business cards, and logos for the pop band they wish they were in, just bought Affinity, a maker of an Adobe-like suite of creative apps.

The thing is, Canva is a subscription-based service, whereas one of Affinity’s biggest draws is that it is available as a one-off purchase. This is the reason many people prefer Affinity apps over Photoshop, Illustrator, Lightroom, and so on. Canva has committed to keep this aspect, but the whole deal shows just how different the app world is today compared with only a few years ago.

“As a casual user, it’s nice to have a genuine Photoshop competitor that doesn’t require a subscription,” said Affinity user TechZeke in a forum thread participated in by Lifewire.

Rent or Buy?

We used to buy software, and keep using it forever, or at least until we had to update it to a new paid version. Before that, it came in boxes, and couldn’t even get bug fixes.

Now, we grab a small app from the store whenever we need to do something, and it’s free, or we can rent it by the month. Software is more accessible than ever, but have we lost something too?

The app-store model is hard to argue with from a convenience point of view. Say you want to make a poster for your local home-baking-based community event or a business card for your dog. You don’t need to buy Photoshop to do that. You don’t even need Photoshop, period, because there are a zillion apps in the store that you can grab and use immediately.

Some might require payment upfront, but it’s unlikely if they actually ever want to get any downloads. The prevailing paradigm across the entire app ecosystem these days is for “free-to-play” apps that you can use immediately. These are apps like Canva, which is pretty excellent, and extremely easy to use for beginners, unlike Adobe’s Illustrator, which is obviously more powerful but requires a lot more work just to understand the basics.

So how do these apps survive? They either charge a subscription, or they collect your personal data and sell it, or they go all-in on getting account sign-ups so they can eventually sell to Google or Facebook or somebody.

Of these, the subscription is probably the best for everyone involved. The user can dip in just for a month if that’s all they need, and the app developer has a regular income that allows them to keep working on the app. The other models—grow-to-sell, privacy invasion, or venture-capital funding—are all user-hostile for one reason or another.

So why don’t people like subscriptions?

Subscription Fatigue

Let’s take a quick survey. Are there any apps on your computer that you paid a chunk of money for, straight from the developer that makes it? I have one: Ableton Live, which uses the old-school model of charging several hundred dollars, offering updates for a few years, and then charging an upgrade fee for the next major version.

The advantage of this is that, if you don’t want to update to the latest version, you can keep on using the app forever, or until your old version will no longer run on a newly bought computer. I have friends running very old versions of Ableton on decade-old MacBooks, for example.

This is essentially the same paid software model that we’ve had forever, right back to boxed software that came on disks. But with app stores, it all changed.

The app stores started with paid-up-front apps, but quickly went to a free model, with in-app purchases. The problem is, app store prices are too low to support a developer like that. There is no way to charge a user for an update, the way you can outside the store. So many apps now require a subscription. And there are only so many apps that any of us want to subscribe to.

Canva bought the Affinity suite to turn itself into a real rival to Adobe’s Creative Suite, and it may be weaponizing the payment model to do that. The Affinity suite has two big differences compared to Adobe’s suite. One is that all the apps are fantastic on mobile. They’re essentially the same as the desktop versions, whereas Photoshop, say, is still bound to the desktop. And the other is that you can download Affinity apps for free, and then pay once to own them.

This is a big difference, and Canva has pledged to always keep a “perpetual license” available to buy. Big companies lie all the time, but in this case, that one-off payment option might be Affinity’s biggest advantage over Adobe, and it’s probably here to stay.

“As long as Canva doesn’t take its eye off the ball, it should give Adobe real competition in the pro-level creative space for the first time in years,” Ernie Smith, writer of tech newsletter Tedium, wrote on Mastodon.