Apple has decided to compete for creativity app users

https://alex4d.com/notes/item/apple-competing-for-creativity-app-users

by speckx • 1 day ago

73 61 1 day ago

alex4d.com

madebysnacks• 1 day ago

Apple should buy Sketch

kwanbix• 1 day ago

What the world needs. Less competition.

cosmic_cheese4• 1 day ago

I'm on the fence on this idea. I think it depends on how well it's doing financially, basically to what extent has Figma eaten its lunch.

I never boarded the Figma train because I prefer the UI of Sketch, as well as its local-first approach and how its file format is publicly documented so I actually own my data. I do worry about it going under though, and if Apple buying it up is the only way for that to happen so be it.

If nothing else it'd keep it out of Adobe's hands which is worth a lot on its own.

mortenjorck• 1 day ago

Sketch lost the market to Figma, and now Figma is losing the market to vibe coding.

I'm not sure what the value proposition of Sketch is these days apart from local, non-cloud editing (although you can even get that with a pretty decent UI these days with Lunacy).

LoganDark2• 1 day ago

Sketch has always been the app I use for quick throwing-together of things. Figma seems designed for specifically corporate design documents which is icky.

cosmic_cheese4• 1 day ago

Vector screen-destined assets. Illustrator is print-centric and awkward for the use case, and while Photoshop is technically capable of it that's not what it's made for (also, Adobe CC is just way too bloated for its own good). Figma is oriented around mockups and not as good for assets.

There are also platforms which are less vibe-friendly, and old style mockups can still be useful when nailing down a design system across platforms.

tombert• 1 day ago

Doesn't Apple already have a loose competitor to Figma? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freeform_%28Apple%29

rramon• 1 day ago

They bought "Play" recently, it was an UI design app dedicated to SwiftUI.

wwalexander• 1 day ago

I much prefer the interface of Pixelmator and Pages to Photoshop and InDesign, and paying once (for the non-AI-augmented version of Pixelmator, which Apple indicate will continue to receive some manner of updates going forward) is a nice plus.

It’s unfortunate there’s not a real Illustrator equivalent; Pixelmator has okay enough vector editing and export support for my needs, but notably will render the canvas rasterized at whatever the nominal resolution is even when zoomed in editing an SVG. Vector exports work as expected, just the editing is rasterized. Still, a small price to pay for not paying monthly for Adobe’s mountain of crufty malware.

graypegg• 1 day ago

I feel like there had to have been some appetite within Apple to acquire serif (the Affinity suite of apps, Affinity Designer being a great Illustrator alternative) before Canva did because they were making non-kneecapped iPad apps, getting demos/mentions at Apple events, and just generally seeming like a good fit from the outside. (Other than being a non-Apple-technology cross-platform suite)

I can’t say that would’ve been a perfect outcome all things considered, but Apple certainly would’ve had a well rounded creative suite.

badrequest• 1 day ago

Probably safer to assume that they always had someone serving in this position and they recently left.

azeemba• 1 day ago

A single job posting for an engagement team doesn't really tell you if its a company strategy or not.

Directors hire on random ideas all the time and then pivot as needed

roboror2• 1 day ago

A single job posting for an engagement team

A single job posting for an engagement team in Poland.

TeMPOraL• 1 day ago

A person from Poland here: why does the country matter here? What are the implications you're implying?

josefrichter2• 1 day ago

Side note to author: the web renders really bad on mobile

roboror2• 1 day ago

Renders poorly on desktop too.

khazhoux• 1 day ago

Also, the content is uninteresting on both.

cryo32• 1 day ago

Really not interested in this one. There is no data portability as none of the file formats they use for anything are documented and they are shovelling you into an eternal subscription model. At least Adobe file formats are well documented and have importers on pretty everything else so you can escape if you need to. I can open illustrator and photoshop files in a load of other apps, including open source. Pixelmator and their office stuff, nope.

I’ve been in this trap before and I’m only interested in portable, documented, non subscription stuff.

I’ve moved to Darktable, Inkscape and libreoffice here mostly for my needs. I don’t really need photoshop equivalent.

LoganDark2• 1 day ago

this has nothing to do with creativity app users, and everything to do with enshittification -- locking features that used to be free behind a monthly subscription, and ensuring new features are not offered to owners, but rather only available through renting. it has nothing to do with competition either

schainks2• 1 day ago

They released a bunch of apps for creatives last year. That was the signal, no?

dd8601fn2• 1 day ago

They bundled existing apps in a subscription.

schainks2• 16 hours ago

Where have I seen that before…

steve19772• 7 hours ago

Hey but they got new icons. Because the non-subscription app still exist as well.

jwr• 1 day ago

Well it's a good thing they killed Aperture, then. Makes perfect sense.

(I was badly affected by that and decided not to trust them to maintain anything over the long term anymore)

Update: I now re-read the job posting and also realized that none of the responsibilities listed there are good for the users. This is bad news.

Keyframe2• 1 day ago

That tells us nothing, nothingburger speculation. However, Apple had that major incident in its history when they made Adobe mad when they went out and shopped for final cut pro, color, and a handful of compositing apps. Didn't turn out well for Apple at the time.

dylan604• 1 day ago

Was that as mad as when Adobe didn't believe Apple when they said to switch to 64bit so they didn't because FCPStudio wasn't updated to 64bit only to have Apple release FCPX instead causing Adobe to miss an entire upgrade version on Mac? (you should read that run-on breathlessly as intended)

Keyframe2• 23 hours ago

Yeah, we were all there when it happened. It was rich, to say the least lol.

steve19772• 6 hours ago

IIRC, at least part of team behind Final Cut was ex-Adobe, which probably didn't help either)

darth_avocado• 1 day ago

Why is this on front page HN? There is no concrete information here

dabinat• 1 day ago

There’s no escaping that whatever money Apple makes from this will be a rounding error compared to iPhone / iOS revenue. I honestly think the apps would be better served to be sold to a smaller company where such revenue was a bigger piece of their pie and they were therefore incentivized to care about them.

reaperducer2• 1 day ago

There’s no escaping that whatever money Apple makes from this will be a rounding error compared to iPhone / iOS revenue.

I can't even imagine what it would be like to work in an Apple-sized rounding error.

flkiwi• 1 day ago

The Creator Studio is a pretty big miss for Apple. Pages, Numbers, and Keynote have always been productivity apps, not creativity apps (and there is a difference). Of the remaining apps, Pixelmator Pro is the only one that is remotely relevant to my needs, and I'm not subscribing to a $12.99/mo plan just for Pixelmator. Compared to $19.99/mo cost for a much more coherent set of Adobe photography and imagery tools, it's a no brainer to go with Adobe. Not the outcome I would prefer, but a bunch of audio and animation tools will be functionally useless to me, so I'm being asked to pay $12.99/mo for a photo editing app and some productivity tools I already have. I'm sure there are some people who will benefit from the breadth of the Apple bundle, but I don't expect there are THAT many.

The fact that it is impossible to get Pixelmator Pro outside the bundle just makes the situation more ridiculous, unless you want the legacy version.

Create serious pro/prosumer tools for creative verticals again (Aperture, you are dearly missed) and you'll have my attention.

ctippett3• 1 day ago

It's not bad value at AUD$4.99 per month (education pricing). I only really use it for Final Cut Pro though.

shevy-java• 1 day ago

Folks - don't work for Evil. Any startup or smaller or even some medium-sized companies should be better work-places than the big greedy corporations. Granted, greed is an addiction and most people will fall to whoever pays most (that's understandable), but think of the ethics factor as well whenever the income is considered. Working for Evil comes with a karma penalty; Google taught us thus whenever an ad is infiltrating your computer.

thenthenthen• 1 day ago

Evil comes in all sizes

whyenot• 1 day ago

Bring. Back. Aperture!!! Yes there are alternative to Lightroom out there (Capture One, for example), but Aperture was so Mac native and was such a joy to use on OS X.

CharlesW• 1 day ago

Aperture (RIP) is never coming back, but many of us Aperature fans have been happily using Nitro¹, built by the guy who led Aperture and other imaging teams at Apple².

¹ https://www.gentlemencoders.com/nitro-for-macos/index.html ² https://www.gentlemencoders.com/about/

squidsoup• 1 day ago

It's a pity that Apple neglects its creative apps. I've been working on a video project using Motion recently, and while not as capable as After Effects, it's pretty serviceable and with some love could be excellent.

smugma• 1 day ago

https://techcrunch.com/2026/03/16/apple-acquires-video-editi...

"MotionVFX, a Warsaw-based company"

Apple has decided to compete for creativity app users

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