Apple / photo_and_video / CANVA: AI VIDEO & PHOTO EDITOR
REVIEW
Canva turned design-by-template into a category nobody else can catch.
The iOS app is the front door to a $40-billion design platform that now owns Affinity, ships Magic AI across every surface, and is reportedly walking toward an IPO.
BY THE APP COMRADE DESK · MAY 11, 2026 · 5 MIN READ
Canva: AI Video & Photo Editor
CANVA
OUR SCORE
8.7
APPLE
★ 4.9
PRICE
Free
For a decade Canva has been doing something the rest of the design industry kept misreading. Adobe assumed people wanted better tools. Figma assumed they wanted better collaboration. Canva assumed they wanted to be done, and built a template-first editor around that assumption. The result, in 2026, is a roughly $40-billion private company with a reported IPO on deck, ownership of the Affinity desktop suite, and an iPhone app that has become the default place a generation of creators, small-business owners, and teachers reach for when they need to make a graphic.
The mobile app is the most-used surface of the whole platform, and it is built for someone who has roughly four minutes between opening the app and posting whatever they made. That constraint shapes everything — the template grid, the gesture model, the way the Magic Studio AI is wired directly into the editor instead of hidden behind a separate workflow. None of it is glamorous. All of it works.
Canva understood that most people making a graphic don't want a tool — they want the finished thing, lightly edited.
FEATURES
The iPhone and iPad app opens to a feed of templates sorted by what you most recently made — Instagram posts, presentations, video reels, business cards, resumes, t-shirt prints, whiteboards. Pick one, swap the photos, drag the text, export. The whole flow is built around editing rather than starting from a blank canvas, and the touch handling is the part the company has spent years refining: snap-to-grid, two-finger group resize, long-press to duplicate, double-tap into a text frame.
The Magic suite is now embedded into every editor surface. Magic Write generates body copy inside a text frame; Magic Design takes a prompt and a photo and produces a full set of on-brand templates; Magic Edit does generative photo fill; Magic Switch reformats a finished design across every aspect ratio you might post it to. Background removal, voice-driven video editing, and on-device handwriting-to-text all live one tap deep.
The video editor handles multi-track timelines, transitions, audio ducking, captions auto-generated from the soundtrack, and direct export to TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube. The mobile app reads the same brand kit — fonts, colors, logos — as the desktop, and any file you open on the phone syncs back through the Canva cloud immediately.
MISSION ACCOMPLISHED
Canva understood, earlier than anyone else, that most people making a graphic don't want a tool — they want the finished thing, lightly edited. The template library is now in the hundreds of thousands, the photo and font libraries are licensed for commercial use inside the paid tier, and the brand-kit feature means a small team can lock fonts and colors so the intern can't ship a poster in the wrong typeface.
The pricing structure quietly does the work of three apps. The free tier is genuinely usable — enough templates, enough exports, enough storage that a creator can post for months without paying. Canva Pro unlocks Magic Studio, premium assets, and Brand Kit; Canva Teams adds shared brand controls and approvals. The 2024 acquisition of Affinity (Designer, Photo, Publisher) means the same parent company now sells a desktop-grade pro toolchain to the people who outgrow Canva — a posture none of the legacy design vendors have matched.
ROOM TO IMPROVE
The flip side of templates-as-product is that everything made in Canva looks a little like everything else made in Canva. Power users hit the ceiling fast: type controls are thinner than Affinity Publisher or InDesign, vector editing is shallower than Illustrator, and the export pipeline doesn't expose color profiles, bleed, or spot inks the way print designers need. The Magic tools are improving quickly but still occasionally produce the same generic stock-photo look across unrelated prompts.
The subscription tier gates a growing share of what used to be free, and the in-app upsells around premium photos and AI credits have crept into nearly every workflow. None of this is fatal — the free tier still ships real work — but the trajectory is unmistakable.
CONCLUSION
Install this if you make social posts, decks, invitations, or short-form video and you don't want to learn Adobe's pricing. Skip it if you're a working designer who needs typographic control or print-grade output — Canva owns Affinity for exactly that reason, and Affinity is where you should be. Watch the IPO: the company is reportedly preparing one, and how Canva balances paid features against the free tier post-listing will tell you everything about the next two years of the product.