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.
The issue with Windows support for tools like Pixelmator is that a great many of its features are wrappers around OS level image manipulation libraries that come with macOS/iOS - Windows doesn't have anything like the rich image manipulation libraries built in that macOS has, so to get feature parity would very likely involve building from scratch a ton of the stuff they didn't have to do on macOS. The Pixelmator developers have said this before in their own support forums too when question of Windows/Linux support is asked.
This is partly why we often see new image editor apps only hit macOS/iOS sometimes, especially if its from a smaller development team.
> This rules out use in most of the professional world
I don't agree with this; I have never worked at a company the design team weren't all on Macs, regardless of company size. Sure it rules out some professional use but I doubt it's even a majority. The output image file assets can be shared with any OS etc etc so not like it stops collaboration either.
I always assumed Apple's strategy in building Core Image was to encourage developers to create image editing apps so they didn't have to. Plant the seeds and watch the flowers bloom. Perhaps it hasn't happened in quite the way they hoped.
They sold to Canva, which is strictly subscription based. As far as I know there haven’t been negative changes yet, but we’re still in the period before we’d see them.
Did you see the statement from Canva and Serif after those kinds of rumors started circling? They made a strong statement that they aren't making Affinity apps subscription or dissolving the teams on those apps. It's not the usual silence on post-acquisition plans.
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.