I'd legitimately love to know why this has worked wtf

Does this still load as fast. I have found that, after you have run the app once, it will load very quickly for a day or so and then load more slowly again. I believe that there is a cached state which does not run the slow check and which expires after a while and a new check must be run.

It has been two days since I ran Affinity Photo, latest version, and it took about 30 sec to load.

This fixes the problem permanently.

Why does this work?

I have no idea. I found it deeply buried in a support forum the other day.

I think I checked this once and it was doing Rosetta translation

I just updated to the latest version and Affinity Photo 2 opens in seconds now.

I bet you could get the same results by duplicating the inner binary only rather than the whole folder. I saw something very similar with terminal apps.

The blog post doesn't mention this app - am I missing something?

The follow up blog post published today mentions Affinity. It's also one of the worst apps to start slowly on macos.

I think this needs blog post and a much deeper explanation.

That's mind boggling. I always wondered why it takes so long to open. Is it a shady deal with Adobe and Apple?

There is absolutely no reason to jump immediately to conspiracy here.