Canva is giving digital creatives a new way to design, illustrate, and edit photos on their iPads, and it doesn’t have to cost them a thing. After relaunching the Affinity creative suite as an all-in-one desktop app last year, Canva has now introduced Affinity for iPad, which provides the same pro-grade tools for vector graphics, photo editing, illustration, and page layouts in a format optimized for Apple Pencil and touchscreens.
Affinity for iPad has a new Sketch Studio that’s designed for freehand drawing and simplifying sketch-to-vector workflows, including optimized tools for masking and automatically converting rough sketches into cleaner geometric shapes. The app also supports Apple Pencil Pro capabilities like natural gestures, pressure sensitivity, tilt, barrel roll, squeeze, and hover, allowing creatives more control over tools and shortcuts.
“Affinity for iPad delivers the full power of Affinity, together with the versatility and portability of iPad,” Affinity product design head Neil Ladkin said in the announcement. “Every development decision was made by people who create on iPad themselves, from how the Apple Pencil responds to where the tools sit. If you’re the sort of person who rotates the canvas 40 times to get one line right, Affinity for iPad was made by people who’ve done exactly that.”
Sketch, vector design, photo editing, and layout projects can all be saved to the same .af file to limit tasks needing to be exported, converted, or remade, but Affinity for iPad is also compatible with all major design file types. Canva has added its AI Studio to the app, which includes features like Generative Expand for extending backgrounds, automatic motion blur and noise reduction, and image resolution scaling.
When Canva acquired Affinity-developer Serif in 2024, some users were concerned that Affinity would move from a one-time license to a subscription model and adopt Canva’s generative AI tech, eradicating a large part of the creative suite’s appeal compared to rival design software provider Adobe. Canva and Serif pledged not to force users into subscribing to the service, and so far that’s still the case.
Affinity for iPad’s core sketch, vector, photo editing, and layout tools are completely free for individuals, though they require a free Canva account. The suite of AI tools is optional and requires a Canva Pro subscription to access, which starts at $18 per month.
