★ Apple Tends to Do Right by Apps It Acquires

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Pondering the future of Pixelmator by looking at the history of Apple’s app acquisitions.

My post this week about Shazam’s history got me thinking about Apple’s track record with acquired apps. Apple acquired Shazam in 2018, and soon integrated its capabilities into Siri. But they’ve also kept the Shazam app going, including the Android version. They even still have a standalone Shazam website. I’d say this has been an acquisition that’s made everyone happy: existing users still have a great Shazam app, and the core “What song is this?” feature has been made more available and accessible.

At the moment, outside Cupertino (and Lithuania) we’re left with uncertainty over the future of Pixelmator and Photomator after their announcement of Apple’s pending acquisition. In broad strokes, let’s consider the strategic reasons Apple might acquire an existing popular app — or in this case, apps.

Keep the app going under Apple’s ownership — Examples of this include Logic, which Apple acquired by purchasing parent company Emagic in 2002, and going back even further, FileMaker.

Shut down the app and bake the underlying technology into the OS — Examples: Siri and Dark Sky. Siri debuted as a standalone iPhone app in February 2010. Apple purchased the parent company two months later, and Siri appeared as “beta” software built into iOS with the iPhone 4S in fall, at which point Apple pulled the standalone Siri app from the App Store. I don’t recall Siri, as a standalone app, ever being all that popular. And whatever you think of Siri’s quality and utility over the intervening years, it’s the sort of thing that makes more sense as a system-level feature than as a standalone app. A lot of people have a lot of wishes for Siri, but I’ve never seen anyone say “I wish Siri were still just a standalone app.”

Dark Sky is more complicated. After acquiring it, Apple kept Dark Sky going as a standalone (and cross-platform) app, but only for a transition period. The purpose of the acquisition was to integrate some of Dark Sky’s forecasting technology into Apple’s own Weather app and the WeatherKit system framework available to third-party apps. Die-hard Dark Sky fans miss it, and some swear that WeatherKit’s warnings about imminent precipitation aren’t as accurate as Dark Sky’s were, but it’s hard to argue that Apple did Dark Sky users dirty.

Acquihire the developers and designers but scrap the app — This happens in the industry, but not with Apple. I can think of many examples of talented indie developers and designers closing up shop and going to work for Apple, but I can’t think of any good examples of a great popular app being shut down for this. The most tragic acquihire I can think of was when Facebook (now Meta) acquired Push Pop Press, an astonishingly talented team that had made a publishing tool for the modern age that might have been the most impressive software I’ve ever seen in my life. And, poof, the whole thing was just shuttered when the Push Pop team joined Facebook. Inside Facebook that same team created Facebook Paper, which espoused many of the principles that made Push Pop’s interactive publishing tool remarkable, but Facebook Paper, alas, was not long for this world. Facebook Paper was so good, so forward-thinking, so innovative, that it almost got me to create a Facebook account for the first time.

Buy the app out of anti-competitive spite simply to shut it down — The software industry is rife with acquisitions whose only purpose was to quash competition,1 but I can’t recall a single example of Apple doing so. And in the case of Pixelmator and Photomator, it doesn’t make any sense — neither competes against anything Apple makes, and they’re exclusively available as apps on Apple platforms.

The bottom line is that what we, as users, hope for after a big company acquires a beloved app is for an outcome where the users of that app remain happy. That might mean just keeping the app going, like with Logic. Or it might mean scrapping the standalone app, but bringing the core features of the app into the OS itself, like with Dark Sky. Sometimes it’s a mix, though, like with Shazam. Another example like that is Workflow — which began life as a third-party automation utility for iOS, but which Apple acquired in 2017 and turned into Shortcuts. Anyone who liked Workflow surely loves Shortcuts — it’s far more powerful and capable as an OS-level technology from Apple than it ever could have hoped to have been as a third-party app.

Other examples:

Beats, which Apple acquired for $3 billion in 2014, remains the largest acquisition by price in Apple’s history.2 Beats Music became the foundation for Apple Music.

Speaking of music, iTunes began life as SoundJam MP, a third-party MP3 player for the Mac. iTunes was more than just a rebranding — it was a complete redesign and rethinking of SoundJam — but it basically served the same purpose that SoundJam did. (The other option Apple considered was purchasing Panic, whose Audion was SoundJam’s arch-rival.)

Final Cut was an acquisition — Apple bought it from Macromedia in 1998. But it’s a weird one, because Apple purchased it and hired the team before it had even shipped. The acquisition wasn’t just the foundation for the Final Cut Pro we know today, but for iMovie too.

TestFlight was an acquisition, and like Siri and Workflow/Shortcuts, is the sort of concept that requires being a first-party product to achieve its goals.

Shake, a professional video compositing tool, is a rare sad trombone. Apple acquired parent company Nothing Real in 2002, but discontinued Shake in 2009. Some features live on in Final Cut Pro but it does not seem like a successful acquisition for anyone who loved Shake.3

In 2021 Apple purchased Primephonic, and turned it into Apple Music Classical in 2023. Seems like a complete win for Primephonic fans.

Apple made a slew of small acquisitions that have all been funnelled into
improving Apple Maps. E.g., Embark, which was a standalone app for transit information and seems to be the foundation for Apple Maps now having good transit features.

It’s commonplace in the industry for a large company to acquire a small company that makes a very cool app, and then somehow ruin that app. Sometimes by transmogrifying it beyond recognition, but oftentimes through disinterest or neglect. And Apple is a very large company, and Pixelmator is a small company with two very cool apps. But an examination of Apple’s acquisition history doesn’t give me any reason for alarm. Apple really does tend to do right by cool app acquisitions.

Apple respects the art of making great apps. Pixelmator in particular is simply too good to scrap, and Apple hasn’t made its own bitmap image editing application since, I think, MacPaint. Something like Pixelmator really would slot right in next to Final Cut Pro and Logic Pro as an Apple “pro tool”. Whether they’ll keep the name, I don’t know, but I think the app will be released under Apple branding as a Photoshop competitor, for Mac and iPad. (Pixelmator for iOS currently runs on both iPads and iPhones, but Apple’s own pro tools, Final Cut and Logic, are iPad only.)

I’m less sure if Apple has the appetite to keep Photomator going, to compete directly against Lightroom — a market Apple simply walked away from when they discontinued Aperture 10 years ago. But perhaps they now regret walking away from Aperture. I’m just not sure how close Photomator is to being a credible alternative to Lightroom.

The other path would be to retire both apps and fold the best features and technology (like their ML Super Resolution upsizing) into Photos, and/or into the system-level Core Image framework available to all apps on all of Apple’s platforms. I can see how the best of Photomator could make its way into Photos. That’s not true for Pixelmator. The acquisition just doesn’t make sense to me unless Apple wants to make Pixelmator an Apple-branded pro tool. We’ll find out next year.

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