Apple Acquires Pixelmator
Today we have some important news to share: the Pixelmator Team plans to join Apple.
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Pixelmator has signed an agreement to be acquired by Apple, subject to regulatory approval. There will be no material changes to the Pixelmator Pro, Pixelmator for iOS, and Photomator apps at this time. Stay tuned for exciting updates to come.
Based in Vilnius, Lithuania, Pixelmator has developed a suite of well-regarded creative tools that compete with Adobe’s offerings while maintaining a focus on ease of use and performance. The company’s apps have been exclusively available on Apple’s platforms, including Mac, iPad, and iPhone.
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Financial terms of the acquisition were not disclosed. The deal marks Apple’s latest investment in professional creative tools, following previous acquisitions in the space such as Logic Pro and Final Cut Pro.
My initial assumption is that this is an acqui-hire. It doesn’t seem like their stuff really fits into Photos.app. But I suppose it’s possible that Apple wants to add a new iWork/Pro app.
I don’t know what this means for the future of Apple’s apps—though I hope it means Photos is going to get a serious infusion of new talent and functionality!
If you’re a Pixelmator Pro or Photomator user, this has to be a bit of a bummer, but there’s some good news: It will probably take a few years for Apple to fully integrate the team into whatever is happening next, and the existing apps will probably still be around until then.
Pixelmator and Photomator already look like Apple’s own “pro” apps. From the get-go, the Pixelmator team hasn’t just followed Apple’s own trends and guidelines for UI design, they’ve helped define those trends.
Does Apple want to fold these advanced features into Photos? Or do they once again see the need for separate consumer/professional first-party apps? Logic, for example, was an acquisition — but that was all the way back in 2002. If Apple keeps Photomator as an actively developed product, it would be a return to the same genre they walked away from when they discontinued Aperture in 2014. And if Apple keeps Pixelmator going, it would be the first time they go head-to-head against Photoshop itself.
The calls for Apple to have its own Photoshop competitor date back to the early days of Mac OS X, and the heyday of the Final Cut Suite, when Apple had an entire lineup of pro software for various niches.
Today, this Pixelmator acquisition could have far-reaching implications for iPad and Vision Pro, who have not been as well-supported by third parties making pro apps like the Mac has.
I would very much welcome an Apple that cares as much about, and fights for, pro apps as it used to.
On the flip side, Apple has a graveyard of pro apps it acquired, extracted all the value from, and left to rot along with their legacy userbases 😅
I’m sorry if that seems cynical, but Apple’s track record with software acquisitions is abysmal. My guess is either they’ll kill it completely or replace it with something unrecognisable in a year or two.
Pixelmator Team could AppKit harder than Apple and I now feel like Apple is going to ruin this marvelous app. Damn it. Damn iiittttttt. Pixelmator Team makes Mac-ier apps than even Apple. Apple just ships even-more-stretched out iPad apps
Welp.
I am also a touch worried. The first thing I thought of was Apple’s purchase of Workflow, now Shortcuts. In the past seven years, the capability of Shortcuts has been expanded tremendously, but it has also been routinely broken in iOS updates. There are frequent errors with syncing, actions stop working without warning, and compatibility does not always feel like a priority in new first-party software releases.
So, good for Pixelmator for attracting Apple’s attention and delivering quality software for years — software which can go toe-to-toe with offerings from companies far larger and richer. I hope this acquisition is great news for users, too, but I think it is fair to be apprehensive.
As someone who does all the graphics work on this site and others with Pixelmator, I’m a little nervous what the future will bring. The last big Apple acquisition of a beloved app was Dark Sky and that was eventually killed off and rolled into the Weather app. There may be some good news—Apple also acquired Workflow, improved it and renamed it Shortcuts. Looking back even further, Logic Pro was actually an acquisition, too.
Ballpark Pixelmator acquisition math.
Apropos of nothing surely, Acorn remains a great Core Image-based Mac app for working with images.
See also: Mac Power Users Talk, TidBITS Talk.
Previously:
- Canva Acquires Affinity/Serif
- Elegy for the Native Mac App
- Photomator for Mac
- Sunsetting Dark Sky
- Pixelmator Photo Switching to Subscriptions
- Apple Acquires Primephonic
- Pixelmator Pro Gets AppleScript Support
- Apple to Acquire Intel’s Modem Business
- End of the Line for Aperture
- Pixelmator Pro vs. Photoshop CC
- Why Did Apple Spend $400M to Acquire Shazam?
- Apple Acquires Buddybuild
- Apple Acquires Workflow
Update (2024-11-05): Gus Mueller (Mastodon):
Acorn and Pixelmator came out 15 days apart from each other in 2007, and the target market between the two has always overlapped. But even with that I've always been on good terms with the Pixelmator folks. Any time we were both attending WWDC, we would meet up and complain about image APIs or just chat over lunch.
The other major player in this category is Affinity, was purchased by Canva in March of this year. So it feels strange that Acorn is now effectively the only independent Mac image editor from that era.
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I use Pixelmator Pro and installed on a some clients' and friends' Macs. They love it, too.
From my point of view, it was the first great low-cost alternative to Photoshop for amateurs. The Affinity line is also excellent.
I look forward to this acquisition.
Pixelmator became irrelevant to my world - fine art photography and digital publishing, when they followed two paths:
- Subscription pricing: I don't rent software.
- Non tear-off palettes / palettes contained in single app window: I use three displays, with the main display as clutter-free document space. If I can't put all the control palettes on my other displays, your media software doesn't even get considered. Developers knew how to do this stuff 30 years ago. Photoshop, Quark Xpress, Director, EVERYONE could do it, but for some unfathomable reason developers think we all work on single screen laptops and nothing else.
Stop designing Mac Apps like you're making apps for an iPad's touch screen, or for Windows, or Appe's market failure headset.
@Someone:
> Developers knew how to do this stuff 30 years ago. Photoshop, Quark Xpress, Director, EVERYONE could do it, but for some unfathomable reason developers think we all work on single screen laptops and nothing else.
> Stop designing Mac Apps like you're making apps for an iPad's touch screen, or for Windows, or Appe's market failure headset.
AMEN! I couldn't have said it better.
I wonder if in another world Adobe would have bought them, but after Figma they are no longer viable buyers
Congrats to them for getting paid! Haven't used this app in many years but I remember it being a good Photoshop alternative.
> Pixelmator Team could AppKit harder than Apple and I now feel like Apple is going to ruin this marvelous app. Damn it. Damn iiittttttt.
Yes they could. Sadly that's not saying much nowadays. Apple is obsessed with SwiftUI, which quite frankly sucks.
If only Apple could acquire a company that knows how to do UI and vector graphics, the annotation tools in Preview would not suck that much.
Probably the best exit the Pixelmator team could wish for. I'm guessing that Photomator got Apple's attention and that it will be quickly integrated into Photos.app.
While I don't do photo editing very often, Pixelmator was my go-to app for simple graphics work. I hope they will keep it around for a long time. It would be really sad if it disappeared as a standalone app.
"My initial assumption is that this is an acqui-hire"
If that's true, it's stupid. Software talent is pretty cheap and plentiful right now, there's no reason to buy a whole company to get a bunch of people. There is, however, a reason for Apple to have more software moats, particularly on the desktop.
At the moment, if you want to succeed on the desktop as a new software company, you build a web app, not a native app. That's bad for Apple. They need to show people that native apps actually matter, and they currently fail at that.
Hopefully the US government will block this. Pixelmator is a great company and a great app on it's own and Apple is already too big and too conglomerated. It's only going to interfere with the app's progress and causes people to lose their jobs
"Hopefully the US government will block this"
That seems unlikely. Apple acquiring Pixelmator will not consolidate market share in the image editing market.
I'd like to put a plug in here for Nitro, which is relatively new offering from Nik Bhat, who was formerly one of the developers of Aperture. I've switched to using Nitro now for almost all of my photo editing. I had used RAW Power for years, until it was superseded by Nitro.
I haven't quite made up my mind about dropping my expensive Lightroom Mobile account.
I also use Pixelmator Pro and Photomator. Photomator is excellent — but I prefer Nitro and its workflow. Pixelmator Pro is a wonderful Photoshop alternative for me, and I'd be lost without it.
This s terrible news. Regulators should stop this and any more acquisitions by Apple and the other Silicon Valkey behemoths.
Regulators should stop this? Why? They are buying a small software company that makes apps which have plenty of competitors…they aren’t trying to merge with Google. Good god. I swear some people will only be happy if nobody ever gets paid. We should be happy Apple is willing to pay ….I like this story much more than the Masimo one.
Sure it sucks that Apple will probably kill apps people like but the devs deserve the payout. The pessimism just speaks to the fact that Apple has let everyone down on the software side for almost a decade now. Hopefully Apple will surprise us on this one…
@ObjC4Life
The argument would be that if Apple kills it, they've destroyed a good tool. If Apple doesn't kill it, they make it harder for its competitors to survive. Either way, Apple gets more control and makes things worse.
The issue isn't a small company getting a payout. The issue is a large company getting even more sway.
What we don't know with the buyout is... did Pixelmator seek the buyout because the economics of independent Apple platform development for ambitious tools simply aren't there?
Even Affinity with their cross-platform volumes couldn't stay independent.
With Apple having essentially hollowed out the software market by refusing to allow upgrade pricing for more than a decade on their iDevice platforms, and stealing more of the oxygen in the ecosystem with high priced hardware, and aggressive obsolescence of APIs etc increasing developer costs, maybe this is a way for them to throw in the towel without Apple getting bad PR for a prominent developer folding?
> Even Affinity with their cross-platform volumes couldn't stay independent.
Maybe they could but the offer was so good they couldn’t refuse it?
Apple bought DVDirector in 2000, and released DVD Studio Pro in 2001. It lived until 2009.
Shake was bought in 2002, EOL'd in 2006 then axed in 2009 and parted for features Motion and FCP
PixelShox Studio turned into Quartz Composer after hiring the developer, it had a long-ish life of 11 years from Tiger to Sierra (2005-2016).
What will the arc of Pixelmator be? Hopefully it won't be a hot potato that gets dropped like DVD authoring (iDVD 2001-2011) Will it be parted into other apps? "Preview" is a misnomer at this point with all the Markup tools, will they heap in even more functionality?
I believe Apple’s acquisition of Pixelmator could mean exciting new tools for creatives, though some worry Apple might change or phase out the beloved app. I think Pixelmator fans can expect their favorite features to stick around a bit longer.
