Apple Acquires Pixelmator

Putting concerns about future states aside, congrats to the Pixelmator team. I've been using the app for years and it's a really great piece of software, well designed and well built. It's always been incredible value for the price, especially given that it basically replaces Photoshop for a wide swath of the market without compromising on UX (which is a problem for other competitors) at a price point that's like 1-2 months of an Adobe subscription (I don't even know exactly what that costs any more because Pixelmator + parts of the Affinity suite got me out of their clutches).

Adobe must not be stoked about this news. And I'll just keep my fingers crossed this all heads in a direction that's more Logic than Dark Sky.

Is there any way this can go bad?

When Apple acquired DarkSky, they absolutely destroyed a service that I loved and relied on. Four years on, Apple Weather is less reliable than DarkSky, and not even close to feature complete.

But DarkSky was a cross-platform service, whereas Pixelmator is software that's already Apple-only. I'm wondering how much I should be worried, and if I should already be abandoning ship.

apple's pro apps have been in a weird space for a while. aperture dying was a bummer, and final cut and logic feel simultaneously actively developed and abandoned to me, there's just not much buzz around them.

it would be very neat if apple started to build the necessary portfolio of software to provide a viable, ideally not-subscription-based competitor to adobe's suite of products. they certainly have had the chops to be competitive in the creative space for a long time, so it feels like something they'd be well-positioned to seriously take on if they invested heavily in it.

i haven't been as in touch with the video editing space as i was 2 decades ago when i worked in TV, but it feels like FCP is not the juggernaut it once was from the outside. my read may be wrong. similarly, logic doesn't feel as prominent in the music world anymore - i really rarely see musicians using it these days, though again that may just be my bias in the kinds of folks i pay attention to. would be cool to see the apple pro suite really regain its mojo and shake things up.

Well done team Lithuania! Remember hearing Pixelmator founders giving a speech ~12 years ago. They were very vocal and repeated this many times: "Our marketing strategy is to just focus on the product". Not sure I agree with that statement, but they sure seem to followed it thoroughly. Congrats on the acquisition!

I'd never heard of Pixelmator before (congrats to them on the exit), and:

WOW their website already looks like an Apple website. The colors, the font, the logo with the same colors as Apple Photos, all the images that show a Mac window, the shade of red in the top right, the "machine learning" section that almost looks like Notes, and I scrolled down and it's all about how great Mac is.

It seemed inevitable that Apple would either acquire or copy them, with how much this already looks like an Apple product, and is exclusively made for Mac apparently.

I'm half unsurprised as Pixelmator was one of the apps that was extremely-tightly-integrated with Apple's APIs and ecosystem and was an excellent app as a result, and half worried that Apple will make unpopular changes to it as it's a less user-friendly app by necessity. (see also recently: Apple's Dark Sky acquisition and the worse integration of it into the Weather app)

I don’t think this will be good for users, but I do think this is the right call at the right time for the company. They get (presumably) top dollar for their outfit prior to the next big market crash, and just as investor funding is drying up outside the AI realms. Hopefully everyone involved gets enough dosh to live comfortably, and can focus on their next big passion or project once the NDAs and Non-Competes run their course.

For us users…oof, the market just got that much smaller. I already avoid Adobe, and I’m considering bailing on Capture One (if I could just get those Fuji LUTs elsewhere) for my photography hobby; Photomator seemed a natural alternative to explore, but now that’s no longer the case.

Man, what I would give for Aperture to make a comeback. Just something simple, fast, and lacking in feature creep. No pesky AI masking or image replacement, just good old hardware-accelerated gallery management and image editing sans subscription.

Pixelmator is my favorite photo editing tool. It’s like Photoshop without the baggage/subscription and is perfect for the types of edits I need to do. I’m cautiously optimistic about this acquisition, I almost hope Apple just makes it free as part of the iLife suite (or whatever it’s called now).

I bought and used Pixelmator a long time ago, but stopped right after Affinity Photo (and Designer) came out. I didn't follow its development very closely since then. Has anyone used both Pixelmator and Affinity Photo recently? I'd appreciate some comparison here.

Very interesting move. Adobe must be trembling.

Lots of people have already left Premiere and AE for Resolve. If Apple offers Photoshop and Illustrator alternatives it will remove the need to pay for the Adobe subscription for a lot of Mac users (that will probably be the case for me).

This is in no way a criticism of the news, but if Pixelmator isn't for you, consider trying Acorn, developed by the reputable indie developer Gus Mueller:

https://flyingmeat.com/acorn/

It aligns better with my concept of an image editor, based on my experience with Photoshop 4.x-6.x and The Gimp.

I bought Pixelmator nearly a decade ago for my Mac, when I needed a decent image/photo editor. I hope they make Pixelmator free, as mac definitely needs a good default image editor that is more advanced than Preview.

wow, something I know a lot about. I used to work on the Photos Edit team at Apple.

I’m both surprised and not surprised.

The built in edit tools evolved steadily every year, and the infrastructure was quite solid, having been rewritten from the ground up years prior.

But as we’ve seen ML and competitors like google adding so many more features, I kept having the same thought “wow the Edit team must be super busy right now”.

I’m curious what features in Pixelmator they most wanted.

But since it already integrates into Photos as a plugin, it will be extremely natural to integrate into the codebase.

Cool move. Must be a fun time to be working on Edit!

Huge congratulations team, you were always one of the few Lithuanian companies I'm proud to talk about.

Didžiausi sveikinimai!

Man, I don’t think this will be good for users.

The biggest shortcoming of Pixelmator is its lack of Windows support. This rules out use in most of the professional world, not because one must run Windows, but because one must collaborate with others. Pixelmator has long been Apple-centric, but while previously I’d hoped that, in the right situation, they might expand their strategy, now I can’t imagine I will ever be able to use Pixelmator for work.

Its second biggest shortcoming is the plugin ecosystem’s apathy towards it. Apple doesn’t have it in their DNA to fix this. Apple’s developer relations strategy is to own a lucrative enough audience that developers will endure anything for access to them. Apple doesn’t own the audience for professional image editor plugins, and I can’t imagine them suddenly learning a whole new mode of interacting with developers.

Additionally, when a company acquires a much smaller one, they really don’t care at all about the smaller one’s business, they care about how their existing business is affected. For example, when Apple acquired Dark Sky, they transplanted the features that fit into their existing strategy, but they weren’t interested in crowd sourced data or Android weather apps, so they just deleted it, and now the world’s weather forecasts are worse. Maybe, hopefully, Apple believes their walled garden’s value will be increased by the addition of a Pixelmator-like product. But I fear it’s more likely they just want to stick layers in Photos, delete the rest, lose every Pixelmator customer, and cry a fraction of a tear equal to Pixelmator’s profits divided by their own.

Affinity sold out, too. I don’t know where to go at this point.

Makes sense. I'm a pretty casual user of Pixelmator Pro but it really does feel like a first party Apple app.

Best photo editing tool out there for most people. Incredible interface design and integration with the OS.

And such a natural fit of acquirer. This makes total sense and I'm excited to see what comes out of this!

Pure speculation: This is about visionOS. Photo editing is the least friction "pro" task to bring to a spatial computing platform.

The other options I considered:

⁃ Renewed interesting in pro use cases in general. I don't see enough incentive for this. Apple's historical interest in this was winning over creatives, but particularly creatives interested in photography are already won.

⁃ Apple wanted the tech for something on iOS. I don't think there's enough "special sauce" tech Pixelmator has to justify this. Pixelmator's tech is only valuable as a full package.

Astonishingly to me at the time, the app never had a History function (as in Photoshop, list of history you could click through). I had been waiting 3+ years for it to materialize, in order to purchase it. Have since moved on to vector editors and don't see a need to go back.

*Actually now that I think about it, I don't seem to miss the lack of History in vector editors (and just use undo).

Hopefully they will use the Pixelmator remove object model in photos since it is so much better than the Apple one in 18.1.

Unsurprising. Just looking at their website it's full of the same marketing hubris that Apple is famous for, even down to using the exact UX/styling that Apple trends towards on their own site.

There's plenty of free alternatives like rawtherapee, I guess Apple's marketing style really does work. Hmmm, taking note.

>it’s crazy what a small group of dedicated people have been able to achieve over the years from all the way in Vilnius, Lithuania

Silly segway, but at least the codebase, IP (and maybe the dev team ?) might get somewhere safe to stay.

Call me a Cassandra, but the situation in the Baltics is not guaranteed to be safe in the next few years, especially given the probable results from a certain election in a few days.

Of course, "will that photo app keep getting upgrades ?" would be very, very low on the list of problems. But I'm honestly wondering if that kind of consideration played a part in the sell.

Also, as usual for any acquisition: congrats to whoever gets to receive the money, sorry for whoever gets to use the product.

I am fearing that Photomator+Pixelmator get absorbed into the Photos app, but I'm clinging onto the small slimmer of hope that, instead, they'll become entries into the Apple "Pro-Apps" family (next to FCPX, Logic, etc).

Photomator finally added support for managing libraries outside of iCloud and this is exactly what I want. Sure, Photos can handle RAW files, but I don't want giant RAW images getting mixed with casual shots from my iPhone.

Pixelmator is one of the few remaining pro-image editing apps that can be quickly opened for simple, but also serious image work. Affinity got acquired by Canva, now Pixelmator is with Apple. What does that leave us with?

Hopefully Apple doesn't ruin this, but I assume that it will be infested with Apple AI features sooner than later. Oh well, at least Pixelmator Pro is not a subscription service, so it will last me for a while even if that becomes the case.

My initial assumption is that this is more about Photomator than Pixelmator (ie. their Lightroom alternative rather than their Photoshop alternative).

Photomator has shown that you can add a lot of professional-level editing control to an Apple-Photos-like interface without making it difficult to use.

Their ML team also seems quite good — for instance, their spot/object removal tool was often more reliable for me than the one in Lightroom, despite being from a far smaller team than Adobe.

(I also feel that Photoshop has reduced in cultural significance in recent years, and that Lightroom is the more significant tool going forward, but that could reflect my own bubble)

I'm still on Pixelmator classic 3.9 (it's what I have a license for) and it's great. Does everything I need easily as a casual user, and it hasn't changed in years! I've never even thought about upgrading.

Really glad for them. Pixelmator Pro is my go-to image editing software. Reminds me of Fireworks (which I really liked, but then Adobe happened) with slightly worse vector functionalities.

Curious if anybody has a good “combined” editor to suggest.

Just curious but what makes a non-Photoshop photo-editor tool "good"? Aside from AI fill, it seems like the fundamentals of this space haven't changed much since CS6 for 90% of design usecases.

If you have a workflow that includes InDesign, there's a lot of benefit to using Photoshop which a competing tool would have to be truly pathbreaking to defeat. For someone who's learning, it's hard to beat the YouTube resources there are on Photoshop.

It seems that to truly beat Adobe, you'd need a suite at least as good as its own, one that is worth industry making the shift from decades-old workflows

Interesting, and congrats to the Pixelmator team.

Why announce the acquisition before regulatory approval? I think I’d prefer to wait, but maybe it’s because this could be publicized through other channels anyway?

This is both simultaneously surprising (given how long they’ve been in the perfect space to acquire) and unsurprising (given that they’re a perfect fit)

Really looking forward to what comes out of this.

I love Pixelmator Pro, especially because of no subscription fee. If you own Pro for more than 4 months you're spending less money than you would on Photoshop!

With apple giving away garageband for so long, I was always surprised that they didn't have a decent graphics editor option, so this makes a lot of sense to me.

Hopefully it means that the pixelmator team will get a larger budget as well. It's by far my favorite graphics editor compared to affinity, Photoshop, Krita, etc.

Only thing that I really wish it had was a solid puppet warp system for deformation like what you see in photopea or Photoshop.

Combining Pixelmator and Procreate via airdrop is such a nice workflow. I'm happy for the team and I'm holding out hope this will be good for Mac users in the long run. A Blackmagic acquisition would also be interesting. It's too bad there isn't a vector drawing app that's at the same level of Mac integration as Pixelmator. I've used Inkscape and it was amazing but unfortunately very slow.

I am extremely fond of Pixelmator -- I bought the original maybe twelve years ago, and Pixelmator Pro as soon as it came out.

I had access to Photoshop for years before that, but the UI always pushed me away, with too big a hurdle just to get started. Pixelmator got me over that hump, and I never looked back.

It's a great product that I use pretty much daily. I hope Apple runs with it and does great things.

Adobe is going online as in Photoshop will be browser based in the future as they already have a beta version. The days you have an Adobe desktop app that sends data to the cloud will be over in probably 10yrs. Sure they will probably make an "local desktop app" the same way Figma does, but it won't be a true desktop app anymore.

I am dying to ditch Adobe and Lightroom (both Classic or CC) but none of the alternatives (Photomator included) seem to have the same quality of library management features as Lightroom (metadata editing, rating, keywords, face recognition etc.). Have any enthusiast photographers actually found a decent replacement?

Can someone give some insight why acquisitions like this happen? Is it to take over the user base or is it actually about the product itself?

I am asking because I always hear of multi-million dollar acquisitions and wonder if apple (in this case) couldn't just create the same software themselves cheaper.

Love that app, and when they first came out their UI/UX was better than Apple. I remember seeing their dark panels styling and thinking it was sleek and ahead of its time, Apple adopted that same look and feel not long after with their pro apps.

Congrats to the Pixelmator team!

This seems like it would be a good match, except that Apple has a history of "odd" decisions when it comes to in-house software, from HyperCard to Claris Works to Final Cut Pro to Aperture. If I relied on Pixelmator, I would be at least a little bit worried.

The greatest news for customers is that Adobe aren't the ones buying it

RIP Macromedia Fireworks

I always loved pixelmator and they deserve it. 100% of it! Never greedy, ui and ux top notch and I never missed Photoshop once. I’m of course a little scared of its future but I hope Apple will just integrate it inside the new OS updates. Thank you Pixelmator team!!

Would be cool to see this slotted in as a more advanced photo editing product akin to Aperture back in the day.

Apple still makes iMovie separately from Final Cut for video, so there's definitely a path there I think to doing something similar for photography.

As a long time Pixelmator user, this really worries me. I loved DarkSky and then Apple acquired and killed it without a good replacement (I switched to Wunderground because Apple Weather is inaccurate, especially for precipitation predictions).

Bummer. I switched to Affinity (Photo, Designer) this year and am very happy. You can buy a lifetime license across all platforms (iPad, Mac, Windows) for a fixed price. It is great to have high quality software that is not a subscription.

Even if there’s a risk of a “Dark sky” outcome, I’m still happy, because I figured that Pixelmator was at long term risk of getting squeezed in the photo-editing market. It’s just tough for indie devs playing with the big boys.

This would be a great acquisition for Apple if they were to use the patents (if any) owned by Pixelmator and the team behind it to work on Apple's Photos app for the next year, now that Apple Intelligence is out in Beta.

Great news. Hopefully this will drive enough improvements to finally get me off adobe. Photomator is nearly good enough to replace Lightroom and Pixelmator is much nicer than photoshop for casual users.

As a Pixelmator lover, I pray that Apple does not - kill it as they killed Aperture - slow down the development to a glacial pace ‘enjoyed’ by their other prosumer software

The best company that could have acquired them. A rebirth of Apple professional tools is desperately needed. Hopefully this is the start of more attention in that direction.

Wow love pixelmator! Great for team but Uncertain for product.

Love the product, as a casual user of light photo editing it’s allowed me to get rid of Adobe.

I hope they integrate this as a free first class citizen into iOS and MacOS

Anything that helps avoid Adobe is more than welcome.

Maybe this acquisition keep Adobe up late at night for the coming years.

I can never forgive them for making creative cloud such a stupid expensive subscription.

Why is this big news? What exactly is Pixelmator? What I've been able to gather is that it's basically Photoshop, but I didn't get if it's just "yet another Photoshop" or if it has some very unique niche where it's popular or something.

And why would Apple even want it? It's not like they buy every successful image editing (or otherwise) software out there, they have their self-contained ecosystem and I'd assume any new purchase would strive to enhance that.

Not surprising at all. Their website already looked like Apple.

Jokes aside, this has been long overdue. Hope the products will survive somehow.

One of the best purchases I've made. Ridiculously cheap for the features it provides. Hope apple doesn't ruin it.

There is a lot to do to make it more user friendly. That's where the first changes will be made if I have to guess.

Call me jaded but

> Stay tuned for exciting updates to come.

the vast majority of the time the exciting updates end up being:

1. The product you know and love will continue with no difference! We just have free funding! Isn't that great!

2. We have stopped sales of the product, but don't worry, if you already own it you can continue to use it.

3. On X date it will stop working. Please migrate over to [other thing] which only has a smallsubset of the features you came to us for. Thank you for coming on this wonderful adventure with us, we are so grateful that you trusted us, though obviously this was misplaced. Byeeeeee.

which, in fairness, is quite "exciting" if you rely on the software / service. Just not pleasantly exciting.

Are they acquiring the company to get the app, or are they acquiring the company to hire the people?

Excellent program, the only real competitor to Photoshop. I kinda liked that they were independent.

Photomator has everything I need in a Lightroom replacement. I hope Apple takes and uses it all.

> We want to give a big thanks to our amazing users for your support over the past 17 years.

Wow I feel old :)

Apple got scared: if Canva moves Affinity Suite to the web then that makes Apple computers less valuable unless you pay up for Adobe Creative Suite.

Affinity Photo is a bit too powerful for the client-side web right now but within the next couple years it's plausible. Photoshop already works in the full-stack browser well. Just a bit of Canva engineering away.

Great timing. I _almost_ bought a perpetual license last week. Now I know I'll wait.

Sveikinimai!

I can't wait for the pixelmator tools to be subsumed into Preview.

Great news for Pixelmator group/founders (probably a decent exit package). Not sure how I feel about the end user experience owned by Apple though.

Apple has acquired many apps and often either killed them, silently (dark sky?), or UX gone down the toilet.

Probably be one of the use cases cited when big tech is broken up

I hope this means that we get a photoshop competitor in the pro-apps line.

Whoa, nice. I’ve purchased Photomator while it was just a couple of euros.

Did Pixelmator changed the title of the post or was it editorialised?

Well, hopefully now Macs can finally ship with a paint app.

I have owned pixelmator apps for years and love this decision

Fantastic piece of software. Congrats to the Pixelmator team

What can Pixelmator be possibly doing that Apple cannot?

Well deserved. Congratulations to the Pixelmator team!

Big up to the team. Great work over the years.

RIP Pixelmator.

My guess is Vision Pro port coming.

For how much?

BRING BACK APERTURE YOU COWARDS

at this point it is what ai can do for you - no serious m&a without it

Congrats team Pixelmator.

can we re-release the modal version? LOVE full modal apps!

ultimate goal when submitting to app store, congrats

Valio lietuviams!

I know this isn't likely... but a part of me is going, "and so the downfall of Adobe supremacy begins..." evil cackling

It would be hilarious watching them scramble to actually compete with an equal footing player for once.

(Yes, I know I'm probably delusional, but it would be funny to watch)

pixelmator's great. congrats!

Sveikinimai broliams ir visam kolektyvui!

So, another subscription service?