Vector file companion app for mobile review and markup

A creative director or senior designer finishes a vector file on desktop, sends it to a client or junior team member who's on an iPad or phone, and the recipient has no way to open it meaningfully — they're either staring at a flattened PNG export or trying to zoom around a PDF. The designer then gets feedback via voice note or vague email instead of annotated, precise comments on the actual artwork.

The gap exists because full vector editing on mobile is genuinely hard to build, so nobody has shipped it cleanly — but the complaints reveal that a large chunk of users don't actually need to edit on mobile. They need to review, annotate, and approve. 'Live preview on mobile devices is missing' and 'should have some mobile access so that one can work out of the office' are complaints about being locked out entirely, not demands for a full Illustrator port. The distinction matters: a review-and-markup workflow is achievable without rebuilding a vector rendering engine from scratch.

Existing workarounds force designers to export flattened images before sharing, which means the recipient can't inspect individual elements, check text, or understand layer structure. Feedback comes back imprecise. The designer then has to re-open the source file to interpret what 'move the logo a bit left' means in actual coordinates.

This is a recurring business problem because every project has a review cycle, and creative teams on retainer do this weekly or daily. The buyer is a studio or agency paying per seat — the cost of bad feedback loops is real: revision rounds stretch timelines, clients get frustrated, and designers waste time translating vague notes into actionable changes.

What to build

Build a mobile app that renders native .ai, .afdesign, and .svg files with full layer visibility, lets reviewers pin timestamped annotations to specific vector objects, and exports a structured comment report that links each note back to the element and its coordinates in the source file.

Where to start

Start with Affinity Designer users specifically — Affinity's file format is better documented and its user base actively resents Adobe's pricing, making them more willing to adopt third-party tooling in their workflow than Adobe-locked shops.

The hard part

Parsing and accurately rendering .ai and .afdesign files without a licensing agreement with Adobe or Affinity requires reverse-engineering proprietary format details — you'll need to start with SVG and PDF-based workflows and explicitly communicate format limitations to early customers, which narrows the initial addressable use case.

How it makes money

Per-seat monthly subscription charged to the agency, with the reviewer seats (clients, non-designers) free — agencies pay for the tool, clients get access without friction, which removes the adoption barrier on the client side.