When I became a designer 30 years ago, you needed three types of apps: a page layout app, a photo editing app and a vector app. You purchased those apps from whoever had the features you needed. Quark Xpress and Adobe Pagemaker were your options for page layout. Macromedia Freehand and Adobe Illustrator were your vector options. And while there were other photo apps, Adobe Photoshop was the dominant professional photo editor.
Quark missed the boat on Apple’s shift to OS X. Adobe purchased and discontinued Freehand. Without strong competition, Adobe’s Creative Suite app bundle essentially made InDesign free for designers who needed Photoshop and Illustrator anyway. Quark faded. Adobe switched to the subscription-based Creative Cloud model and became the only game in town.
But even with no competition, Adobe still offered separate apps for page layout, illustration and photo editing.
Affinity tried to...