You refuse to stop your unwanted cloud thing, so I am dropping Curve. And now you want to charge us a monthly fee?!
Who else feels that the people at Linearity don’t care? It’s easy - stop using Curve.
Hi brother,
I am a user of Linearity Curve (+Beta testing Linearity Move). I must admit that their product is very good. Yes it lacks many important features when compared with Adobe Illustrator but it get 80% of the job done way faster than Adobe Illustrator.
I run a business myself and any business needs to make profit in order to sustain. If you expect a company to run for free forever, then that cannot work as companies need to pay salaries.
And I am so fed up with Adobe that I genuinely want companies like Linearity to thrive and give tough competition to laggy (and buggy) products of Adobe.
If the consumers will not let newer companies thrive, then Adobe will continue being a monopoly, which is not good for designers in the long run.
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Hi @Zag, I totally understand your concerns, and I appreciate your feedback. We hear you, but I want to clarify a few things about Linearity Cloud and the introduction of our paid subscription model.
We don’t have plans to revert back to local storage. We introduced Linearity Cloud to offer a more tailored and optimized experience for our users. Linearity Cloud allows us to provide features like cross-device syncing, better performance, and more control over synchronization and storage processes. This ensures that your design files are handled with utmost precision and care.
Furthermore, Linearity Cloud serves as the foundation for upcoming features such as advanced commenting, version control, file rights management, sharing, guest viewers, and more. These additions will enhance your overall experience, and we’re committed to developing them as we continue to grow the platform.
As @CM_02 rightly pointed out, in order to continue supporting and improving our products, as well as sustaining our dedicated team, we made the decision to offer a paid subscription model without heavily limiting our products. This approach allows us to provide ongoing updates and new features while ensuring the longevity of Linearity.
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Hi @CM_02 , thanks a lot for sharing your thoughts! We’re thrilled to hear that you’re finding Linearity Curve and Linearity Move valuable for your design needs! Your feedback means a lot to us 
You’ve hit the nail when it comes to the sustainability. Healthy competition benefits everyone by pushing companies to innovate and improve their products. While we aim to offer as much as we can for free, we absolutely need to generate revenue to continue improving our products, providing support, and compensating our hardworking team members.
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@CM_02 I wholeheartedly agree. I think we’d all like to see smaller companies like Linearity take centre stage, and the business of course needs to make money in some way.
BUT, when a company inevitably does begin charging for their services, there are ways to do so gradually without aggravating a large portion of the userbase. Linearity did not do a great job of this with the mandatory cloud rollout (in my opinion, and many others). Very few have issues with paid subscriptions, but hijacking of files was, and still is, really concerning.
The trust which was lost with that change makes it challenging, as a consumer, to invest time or money in Linearity’s products.
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@llui85
Yes you are correct that if rollout was handled poorly, it definitely would have affected the trust of existing users. But since I am a new user and I recently joined this community, I wonder why this community is less focused on demanding more features. Linearity Curve needs lot more missing features. Even basic ones like gradient in a stroke are missing. But the community is not even asking for it. Rather everyone here is busy ranting over this Cloud thing.
I am actually OK with having a Cloud sync, I am not finding any difficulty as such. In fact, I am in favour of having a Cloud sync to be able to use it seamlessly on my iPad and Mac.
Imagine a situation when Linearity offered a Web-based solution (like Figma / Canva), in that case you will automatically be saving designs on their servers so I am not sure why there is so much fuss about it.
Adobe Creative Cloud also has cloud syncing. I agree that keeping it mandatory might be an issue for some but if you need, you can always export your designs and keep them with you in .svg to use it in some other software of your liking. I do not thing Linearity is keeping your design for hostage.
Let me know if I am missing something here.
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@CM_02 Yes, the “mandatory” part of it is what people have issues with. It’s not just that the software requires cloud, it’s that there is/was no way to convert from the proprietary .curve format to a more open format like .svg without the files going into Linearity’s Cloud. Additionally the SVG export is on a per-artboard level, and there’s no way to bulk export.
Some people either had privacy concerns with this and the AI training, or had confidentiality agreements with clients that made this impossible. Ultimately the issue is with Linearity’s reaction or lack of moreso - they haven’t properly addressed the concerns from users (their argument hinges upon delivering a more connected ecosystem, despite the relative technical straightforwardness of allowing local storage).
I think the reason that there’s less product-focused forum traffic, is ultimately that a lot (I would go so far as to say most) of the users who were previously active on these topics have now found alternative software. The “community” has been decimated.
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Also on this point: while, yes, there are a few missing things, overall the current featureset of Curve at this point is solid and sufficient for most needs, so there’s not as much discourse on this topic as before.
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@llui85
I appreciate your detailed response to provide clarity on this. I am hopeful about Linearity as a product going in the right direction, MAINLY due to the introduction and integration of ‘Linearity Move’.
I hope that in future, Linearity address this issue of “mandatory” cloud storage. Moving forward, as I see online communities focusing on privacy focused apps, I think Linearity will only gain if they remove the “mandatory” part.
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This is the kind of statement that really irks me. It sounds completely like something on BS bingo card.
- ‘our users’. No. Some users. Not me and quite a few other people
- ‘Tailored and optimized’ to whose needs? And exactly which needs? This is so vague and free of any meaning without referring to anything specific. You sometimes mention ‘collaboration’ (what if I do not need more collaboration than sharing files?) or integration with other tools—even if it is better and easier to implement with your own cloud, why not offer it as a paid (!) add-on.
If you have done your job then you analyzed which user groups are willing to pay (the most). And it is obviously not users like me. That is okay. You are a business. But by not being open about this, you made it worse and by using this kind of corporate language you are adding insult to injury.
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Couldn’t agree more.
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Good day to you all
First off I will start by letting the community know that I’ve been using linearity for over 3 years now and I use it 99% of the time I design for my clients and even personal use. I’m a graphic designer and I’ve gotten a hang of linearity curve and I’ve taught a lot of people on how to use the app and I’ve been looking forward to linearity move.
But I have A lot of concerns about the latest updates
-
Maybe I didn’t understand what you meant by linearity cloud but now I hate it. I have over 1000 folders of both client and personal jobs that are over 20GB and all got uploaded to the cloud that I can’t have access to over 70% of my documents. Whenever I try using WiFi to download them it’s takes forever and even quits. I’ve update the app more than 5 times too and I’m tired already cause
All the folders that got uploaded became files and scattered too -
The new update about a monthly subscription is a big turn off for me to
I know how to use Corel and a little bit of photoshop but I just love linearity curve cause it just make me sense and I may be forced to head back to those app cause it’s becoming something else these days
Please @Medet and everyone on @Linearity.Team plese listen to your customers and give us what we want cause you might lose a lot of customers if all these continues
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Hi @SPLASHX07, thank you for sharing your concerns with us. We truly appreciate your loyalty as a long-time Linearity user and value your feedback.
We’re sorry to hear about your experience with Linearity Cloud you’ve faced while managing your extensive collection of projects. We also understand the importance of having efficient file management and are actively working to improve this.
Regarding the new subscription model, here’s what’s up: we want to keep Linearity free for users who don’t require all the premium features. Subscription helps us make Linearity even better for creative professionals and businesses.
To assist you in addressing the file uploading/downloading issue you’ve run into, could you please share details about your device model, OS version, and the current Linearity Curve version you’re using? If you can also record a screen recording of the uploading process, that would be incredibly helpful.
Once again, thank you for your support and feedback.
Hey all, Vlad here - the founder. Really appreciate all your comments and concerns and I just want to point out that we’re listening. We didn’t decide to do the cloud over night and we absolutely believe that it will add a ton of benefits over time as we add more functionality.
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Yeah. I quit using Vectornator/Curve, as soon as I found out about the cloud thing. I still keep it on my Mac tho’ in case I need to use a capability of it. I haven’t yet. Switched to Affinity Photo 2, Designer 2, and Publish 2.
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