Weeknote: 2 November 2025 – free Affinity, Apple Family Sharing issues, Kagi search, Gamestation Go, Simogo and more
Affinity is now free. Early in October, photo editors and designers rightly lost their minds as the Affinity suite was pulled from sale. Cue: catastrophising about inevitable enshittification – perhaps by way of a subscription or Affinity being mashed into Canva with a fork. Nope. As I covered for Stuff, Canva’s massive curveball has been to make Affinity entirely free.
The internet still lost its shit over this. Why? I’m not sure. Presumably, people just don’t trust big tech companies anymore – and that’s fair enough. They’re waiting for the other shoe to drop. A Canva co-founder even put out a new video yesterday to outline the company’s reasoning. TL;DR: by making Affinity free, more photo editors and designers will use it. When more people use it, teams will scale in Canva, which means more subscriptions. Oh, and Adobe gets a kicking.
Hashtag remindme 1 year etc etc. But my take, right now, is that this is all a net positive in terms of more widespread access to high-end design tools. And, as I said in my piece for Stuff, Adobe should be very worried indeed regardless.
Apple’s Family Sharing helps keep children safe. Until it doesn’t. That’s my latest for Wired, which explores a rarely considered dark side to family sharing – and similar systems by other companies – that can leave children’s digital lives ‘trapped’ within coercive and abusive relationships. Apple, Google and Microsoft should take heed and rethink how they deal with family breakdown. Whether they will or not, who knows? (My experience of Screen Time and Family Sharing suggests not many sufficiently senior people at Apple are actually using these tools, because otherwise they’d be a whole lot better.)
Google is free, so why pay for Kagi search on your iPhone? I spent a month with Kagi to find out. In short, it’s great. And that’s in part because the underlying thinking behind the service is human. Kagi trusts you’ll like it enough to stick around. So instead of forging towards lock-in, Kagi actively encourages you to look elsewhere when you need to. And if you don’t use the search engine for a month, Kagi will credit you.
Apple values change. Jason Snell’s piece for Six Colors has a brutal finale. Doubly so because it’s basically two chunks of copy/paste that starkly showcase how much Apple has changed in just a year, using Apple’s own words.
The terrible new Met Office design is online. I’d hoped the reworked mobile app was a standalone thing. Nope. And given that barely anything has changed during the beta run, I suspect this design is locked. But do give feedback if you hate this revamp, even if it’s unlikely the Met Office will listen. And if you’re a weather wonk, start looking for alternatives to the Met Office’s Temu Yahoo Weather.)
I want to really like the Gamestation Go. I wrote about this My Arcade gadget for Stuff. It’s the most interesting handheld I’ve seen since the Playdate, because it adds extra controls that let you play classic arcade titles as they were meant to be played. Tempest with a D-pad sucks. Tempest with a dial is magic. But My Arcade desperately needs to improve the software on this handheld to sort some dreadful rendering issues and the insanely twitchy trackball.
Simogo is doing exciting things. If you’re all “Simowho?”, this company created the best ever iPad game, in the shape of Device 6. (If you disagree, you’re wrong. Sorry.) Many of its other titles were also stone-cold classics, not least the spectacular Year Walk and one-thumb classic Beat Sneak Bandit.
In part responding to the ephemeral nature of games on Apple devices, the company has reworked a collection of its mobile classics for Switch and Steam. And there’s also a book, now available for pre-order, that looks into the creation of Simogo games. I’ve been fortunate enough to interview Simogo in the past and so I imagine the book will make fascinating reading. But I know for sure that the Switch/Steam collection is superb, and so if you fancy a new collection of games to see you through November, get a copy now.
I wish the Kagi trial were longer. I initially used up the 100 trial searches a few years ago, but didn’t feel that it was enough to determine whether Kagi was useful. But by now, Google has deteriorated to the point that I just decided to subscribe to Kagi anyway, because how could it be worse than Google?
I should have subscribed a long time ago. It’s so much better.
You know how, when you try switching to an alternative search engine, every fifth search or so, the results are so bad that you end up retrying on Google? In half a year of using Kagi, that hasn’t happened even once. The results are consistently better than what I get on Google.
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My worry with Affinity is that when I paid for the tools, Serif’s interests largely aligned with mine because I (and people like me) gave Serif money. Canva’s interests only coincide with mine by chance, and chance will change.
@Lukas: With Kagi, I agree with all of that. The one major thing I think people might have a problem with is how Kagi lacks immediacy for certain searches. So if you type in a sports team, you’ll get things like results and league tables in Google, but only links to those things in Kagi. I deal with that via bangs to go to specific sites, but I can see how the average user might be less impressed. (X vs Bluesky has the same thing going on.) It’ll be interesting to see whether Kagi fills that gap at some point.
Affinity: Elsewhere, I’ve said I do understand the concerns people have. I share them to some degree myself. But there’s still a widespread ‘the sky is falling’ mindset online that feels over the top. It’s possible Canva might mess all this up a year from now and gate features behind a paywall. Or maybe it really will find the intended flow (basically, more teams signing up through pro users) is working. We’ll have to wait and see.
I don’t think they’ll screw us over in a year. But what I think might happen is a scenario like this: Canva will have its IPO, they’ll keep growing like crazy for another few years, and then they’ll stop growing so much, their stock will stop going up, and they’ll start wondering why they aren’t monetizing all of these professional users who are now locked into Affinty. Then, the enshittification will begin.