One of the things that I think about from time to time is Apple’s collection of apps. Some are the crown jewels, like Apple’s pro apps, and others help an everyday consumer to tackle their iLife. All are pretty starved for attention and resources, outside of infrequent updates aligned with showing off the native power of Apple Silicon, Apple Intelligence, or demos of platform integration that never quite get all the way there.
Three things really brought this up to the surface for me recently: The neglect of Clips and iMovie, the radio silence regarding Pixelmator/Photomator, and Final Cut Pro being trotted out for demos but not shipping appropriate updates.
Everyone’s favorite video apps
Let’s start with the consumer video app space, where until this month, Apple had two iOS video editing apps: Clips and iMovie. Clips was a demo app of Apple doing video-oriented towards social networks, without really understanding social networks, or having a real flow for where the video would wind up afterward. A major headlining feature of Clips was that you could record yourself with Animoji and Memoji. Remember that? That was supposed to be a selling point for a generation of iPhones.
It’s not that it was completely inept, but it was an aimless showcase to demonstrate what Apple could do. It withered over the course of eight years before it was quietly killed.
At no point did it supplant iMovie for iOS as the fun, easy-breezy video editor, which is also in a similarly stagnant state. The only updates iMovie has received in the past year were onboarding screens for permissions settings.
Why is it that Apple can make what is widely regarded as the best video recording experience on any smartphone, but it can’t make a good video editor for a smartphone? Is it partly because these apps don’t have direct payments, so they can only ever be demos for hardware and services that do earn money?
Acquired taste
The Pixelmator/Photomator acquisition was met with trepidation instead of excitement by me and many other people I know who are very fond of these products, because Apple has a poor track record when it comes to acquisitions. It metabolizes the developers into the whole of Apple, and they get other responsibilities in addition to shepherding their app. I’m not sure if the developers are splitting their time with other Apple projects, and what projects those might be, but I would be surprised if they were just quietly working on Pixelmator and Photomator like they were before the acquisition.
While the acquisition was announced almost a year ago in November of 2024, Apple only folded the developers in eight months ago. Prior to the acquisition, Photomator was updated monthly, often with major features. In the last eight months, the only updates have been “bug fixes and improvements.” The last one of those was five months ago. There haven’t been any updates to incorporate anything involving Apple’s new operating systems.
Pixelmator Pro has received one major update, three months ago. It featured new support for… Image Playground and Writing Tools (what?!), along with more reasonable features like improved RAW support and accessibility improvements. But again, no macOS Tahoe feature additions, right down to the fact that the Pixelmator Pro icon still resides in gray squircle jail.
Meanwhile, despite this visibly diminished rate of updates, Apple is still charging consumers for subscription plans for these apps at the same rates as before the acquisition.
I keep telling myself: “Eight months isn’t cause for alarm.” But how long will this go on? Part of the reason Pixelmator and Photomator exist is that they were viable alternatives to Adobe’s Photoshop and Lightroom. Sure, they might be a bit more prosumer than professional, but that’s not nothing.
Apple used to have a viable competitor to Lightroom (in fact, it beat Lightroom to market) and that was Aperture, which Apple gradually cooled on until it died on the vine. Aperture was partly staffed with developers brought in from the acquisition of Shake, which Apple also left on life support and eventually killed.
There’s no reason to start measuring caskets for Pixelmator and Photomator, but I don’t want to find out later that they were just going to be killed and replaced by a new version of Photos with some Photomator features shoved in it. Every month that passes, the app is another month out of date. It eventually adds up.
Dogfooding the crown jewels?
At the very top of the “pro” application pyramid in Apple sits their majesties: Logic Pro and Final Cut Pro. They were the acquisitions that worked, and that success largely happened during periods where the apps were just tweaked constantly after you bought them for a flat, one-time payment. (Except for that one boondoggle where they blew up everything in favor of Final Cut Pro X.) I believe Apple learned a lesson long ago about that, but it also hasn’t made tremendous strides in winning new people over to Final Cut Pro.
Take, for example, Apple’s sterile video presentations that it records for product announcements. They are edited in Adobe Premiere, with the exception of the one time it edited part of a video in Final Cut for iPad for the M4 iPad Pro launch.
It’s been a year and a half since Apple announced Final Cut Camera and support for multi-camera studio recording via the iPad, and it still doesn’t exist as an option on the Mac. You still can’t round-trip project files back and forth from the Mac to the iPad, and that’s after two years of updates. It’s still one-directional and permanent. I guess Apple’s editing team went right back to only editing on Macs in Premiere afterward.
Since then, Final Cut for iPad has added menu bar support for iPadOS 26, but it hasn’t added support for background export. Final Cut Pro is literally the reason that feature was added to iPadOS 26. And yet. There’s also still no concept of a way to purchase Final Cut across platforms, or any explanation about why Final Cut Pro for Mac is $300 as a one-time purchase but Final Cut Pro for iPad is a monthly or annual subscription.
So even when things are going well—and I would say that, despite my nitpicking, things are going well for both Final Cut Pro and Logic Pro—they are the exceptions.
Pro bundle
Of course, Apple may be assembling its own mirror of the Adobe Creative Cloud suite so that it can charge one bundle price for access to a suite of pro apps, and maybe that’s why pricing for everything is frozen in place, and the iPad Pro apps aren’t in step with the Mac ones.
The people who paid for Final Cut Pro over a decade ago are going to be apoplectic if they get moved to a recurring subscription, but the sticker shock of $300 is a lot for new people to get over, even if they know that $300 would get them seemingly unlimited updates.
Ultimately, Apple is asking people to trust its lulls and lurches in app development. What is the money I paid this year for Photomator doing? What difference would it make if that payment were bundled with other infrequently updated apps?
I know it’s trite to say “a brand is a promise,” but what is the promise of these creative apps from Apple? It mostly seems to be that they’re used as vehicles to show off in demos for new hardware, new chip designs, or new platform features. And the more often you see them in demos, the less likely it is that they’re quietly fading away.
[Joe Rosensteel is a VFX artist and writer based in Los Angeles.]
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