Canva's new update makes app building rewarding for developers

Canva reportedly generated about $2 billion in annual revenue in 2024 and now it's willing to cut a piece of that pie for developers.

Recently, the company announced a few updates to its app that make it more rewarding for developers to create paid or free app plugins. While developers previously kept 100% of the revenue from their apps, Canva is now offering additional rewards based on app usage.

The reward comes from the $50 million developer innovation fund the company put aside for apps participating in the monetization program.

This update includes several tools to make things easier for developers to keep creating apps. For one, they added a translation feature. This allows developers to offer their apps in multiple languages and opens up developer products to an audience that might have been beyond reach because of the language barrier.

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Additionally, Canva brought in new API functionalities. These provide developers with tools to create more complex and interactive apps. New APIs such as content query API, authentication and design editing API provide an avenue for developers to continue to produce unique plug-ins that can do a wide range of things like design content, updating text, and even generating design elements based on user prompts.

The update will also benefit users by making it easier to find these plug-ins. Pro Canva subscribers will also now have access to some premium apps at no additional cost.

Up until now, apps have only ever been available in a dedicated "Apps" tab on the Canva platform. So to improve user experience, Apps will now be integrated into various sections of the platform like the photo editing panel, the elements tab and even the text editing tab. This way, it's easier for everyone to reach it.