I think I now have read almost all responses by Linearity with regard to the Cloud mess.
They have “heard [us] loud and clear” and “took everything under consideration” etc.
But what I am still missing is an explanation on why that Cloud move is so important to them. It is obviously not important to many of their existing users: It is driving away quite a few of us. Even users willing to pay like me.
Most what I heard from them was a promise for future features. So what made them decide to force us to move everything to the cloud now?
What are the advantages for me? And compared to me not being able to use Curve anymore because of contractual obligations.
And why are they still sticking to their decision? Without any explanation I could find.
There are apologies for the bad communication, but there are no apologies for the decision itself. Why?
The only “explanation” I’ve seen is that they need everyone on the cloud for interoperability with another of their apps (I forget what it’s called, no idea what it does and obviously have no interest because it suffers with the same fault as Curve - cloud only). So maybe that’s why you missed the reason - the reason is of no interest and no advantage.
Yeah, well, talking about it amongst each other is like preaching to the choir. We don’t need to be convinced that this is a ludicrously ill-conceived move. There can be no other rational explanation than one that is motivated by not wanting to allow users to have control over their own files and file-management.
And what reason would a company have to want to take that from their users, no matter how often and strongly they request to please not be forced into such a “between a rock and a hard place” position? (the hard place being a forceful, unwanted migration into a proprietary cloud, the rock being callously given the option to look for another software solution, if we don’t like the hard place.
Not a single person who I have told about this has reacted with anything other than disbelief and a “well, that just shows how low things have sunk in this age of SaaS and dependency on the cloud.”
Yep, starting a new journey with Affinity Designer. It’s been made clear that we aren’t the target audience now, and we’ve been told not to let the door hit us on the way out. Too old to ignore bad faith actions with the hope of redemption any more.
Good decision! Affinity has been rocking it for so long now, that they can be trusted to treat us with the basic respect that a loyal, professional customer deserves, unlike…
They have also demonstrated how all of their software packages can work together without forcing their users into proprietary cloud, because why wouldn’t it be possible?
Hi everyone. Thank you for repeatedly sharing your views on this and raising your voice. First and foremost, I completely understand how this might feel for you and I do appreciate you taking the time to say so.
However, even though we have now shared multiple times our reasoning behind the move to Linearity Cloud, unfortunately it was always deemed unworthy. I will take you through that one more time and hoping this time it checks out.
We are extremely lucky to be serving millions of users, both individual artists, but also industry leading companies. In an effort to stand on our own feet, shape our future towards offering more collaborative and a more full on marketing design experience (which has been our aim and what we have been stating ever since our rebranding) means we need to have both our products, Linearity Curve and Linearity Move, to be operating on a platform like Linearity Cloud.
Furthermore, we have announced our pricing plans and that we will be monetising back in July. And a subscription model that is based on our own cloud platform was what we decided to go forward with.
Finally, going back to my first point, we want to be in a place where we provide the entire creative process of creating both static and animated assets, with collaborative cloud features, in a subscription model.
I hope these bring more clarity into the entire process. Again, I understand that this may not be the answer you have been looking for, but at the same time, it is our decision. I’d also like to remind you that opening multiple topics on this is absolutely doable, but it also causes added stress and frustration to other members of our community, who have privately expressed their feelings. Our aim is to provide a healthy platform where all members of our community, be they happy or upset about our decisions, feel like they can express their problems.
thanks for your patience. But the above statement is exactly what I said: You speak about what you (Linearity) needs.
I still do not hear where you (Linearity) is considering my (our) needs.
I translate what I hear into:
We want/need to focus on collaboration, because that’s where we think “the money” is.
We are sorry, but we have limited resources, so It is okay for us to leave behind some people and even make them angry.
What I would like to hear (instead of language that sounds to me like “corporate speak”):
We are sorry, that we will not offer a non-cloud environment. Please understand that we need (!) to do that, because we strongly believe that we can earn more money (faster?) this way. And we urgently need to start earning money.
I believe that you could have started to earn money now by introducing a subscription without the cloud. You would not have angered parts of your user base and lost quite some reputation. You could have even charged more for the cloud feature. From a business standpoint that sounds much more reasonable than what you are doing
It has become painfully obvious, that Medet and his likes are programmed to just repeat the same answer over and over, and to omit the answer about what reason there could possibly be to disallow local file saves as an alternative to the cloud.
Linearity has gone the route of a corporate machine, that pretends to care about and wanting to cater to the creative types, while ignoring their legitimate concerns and needs.
I’ll stick to 5.1.2 to maintain my work that I did until their self-destructive decision to “migrate” (take total control of) our work, and will try to migrate my workflow to the Affinity Suite of apps. No such shenanigans there.
Over and out to leave an appropriate (honest) review at Trustpilot, which was created for just such shenanigans. I encourage all of you who feel as slighted as I do, to do the same, as the App Store reviews will be overshadowed by the many years of the (deservedly) glowing reviews that stem from the pre “re-branding” (bait-and-switch) days of the excellent Vectornator.
Thanks for that statement, I think it does bring a little clarity to some of this debate. I think what’s been a little confusing is the way which things have been communicated around the feature set of the app come the new subscription.
i.e. What a lot of us are struggling to comprehend is why, if cloud features are to require a subscription (which I am 100% OK and supportive of), is this being linked to the app and restricting “normal” use of the Curve itself? It seems to me that a significant part of this month-spanning debate is about the separation of Curve and Cloud.
The pricing page on the site and earlier discussion we had implied that all of the current features of the app would remain free (core === current?). This appears not to be the case - I assume that Linearity would require something more than the free plan if I were to upload 60GB of documents? I have more than enough space locally to archive this volume of data, and I’d rather not burden your cloud servers with that amount of data. Am I correct in saying that this will now be impossible on the free plan? (despite being possible before)
My question - once introduced, does the subscription model affect local features, or only cloud features? (like cloud storage, AI image generation). In the subscription plan, are we paying for Linearity Curve itself, or Linearity Cloud?
Many users would like to keep the “current” (prior to 5.2) featureset of Curve, which in theory is still available, but rather illogically is impossible in practice because of the Cloud stipulation.
Thanks for the responses everyone. I’m sorry that what I have been sharing is considered programmed / systemmatic whereas all I’ve been trying to do is share what exactly we are thinking.
All these years, every feature we built, every thing we are currently building, is for the benefit of our users. While at a first glance, Linearity Cloud might seem like a step back to some of you, we look at the longer term benefits where we will constantly keep introducing more features. I’m very sorry that this is not an acceptable enough answer to you but ultimately, I have laid out everything very clearly.
@llui85, the subscription plan gets you Linearity Suite. Both Linearity Curve, Linearity Cloud and Linearity Move. There are no plans to separate payments for specific products at this stage.
Medet, I am not trying to insult you or your colleagues who are trying to help, and I apologize if my incessant comments/posts make you feel otherwise, but what you keep failing to address is this simple question:
If an exclusive migration to your cloud is necessary, in your company’s mind, what is the reason that Linearity is compelled to take away local file storage as an option? Would such an option break anything in your plans, and if so, what damage would this cause for you?
Let’s please stop pussyfooting around this, and would you PLEASE stop avoid addressing this specific point and explain what the reasoning is. I don’t care that Linearity needs their own cloud to get certain features to work. All I (and many, many others) care about is why local file storage needs to be disallowed in order to accomplish your goals.
Appreciate the directness, but please try to use a more constructive language as it does affect how both me, my colleagues and members of this community feel.
I thought I have already explained this but happy to repeat it. Unfortunately, the reasoning you don’t seem to accept remains in the core: This is a foundational need for us to build off of and we don’t have the resources to make all platforms and all storage options available as it stands. The reason we have removed local storage was the fact that we are investing our resources into Linearity Cloud, which paves the way to Linearity Suite, something that we want to introduce pricing plans to, as well as introduce further new features. I sincerely understand how frustrated you are but I also do hope this makes things clearer for you.
Again, I apologize if you or anyone here on the forum felt negatively impacted by my language. I thought that overall, I was being rather civilized and constructive, given the severity of this topic.
You don’t have to thank me for my understanding, because I have no understanding of your reasoning, when other companies, like Adobe, have managed to accomplish what you are trying to accomplish without taking away local file storage…it has worked, prior to 5.2, so why would it be taken out of the app? You said “we don’t have the resources”, and yet, you invest resources into taking out features that were working perfectly well until you decided to change direction…makes zero sense to me and many, many others.
But I realize that this line of discussion is leading nowhere, and that I am being forced to either accept your decision or look elsewhere for a vector design solution, outside of my Adobe CS subscription. Got it!