What Happens to the Great Apps Apple Acquires? ⇥ tapsmart.com
In November 2024, Pixelmator announced that the company would join Apple. Although the post said there would be “no material changes” to the company’s apps, fans were worried. The assumption was that Photomator and Pixelmator (the latter being a rare sort-of-Photoshop for iPhone) were on borrowed time.
But is it always bad news for fans of an app when Apple buys it? Let’s explore some key examples from the past 30 years and see how they inform what Apple might do with Pixelmator’s apps.
One thing I noticed in Grannell’s analysis is that more recent acquisitions — with the exception of Dark Sky — are adopted somewhat whole, whereas the older examples are more like foundations. That could be a coincidence based on the specific examples Grannell chose — it bought Texture in 2018 and built Apple News Plus on top of it, for instance.
This reminded me of a different and unrelated part of Apple’s acquisition strategy, which is when it retains a standalone company. You might think of Beats or Claris, but there are a few others: BIS, Shazam, and — until recently — Beddit. Apple feels like such a monolithic brand to me, and it surprises me whenever I remember that it also has these somewhat independent subsidiaries.