Pixelmator update when?

Joe Rosensteel: Creative Neglect: What About the Apps in Apple?

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.

I'm so glad Joe wrote this article because I was starting to think something similar myself, and now I can just link to his dive into the details.

I'm not a massive user of Pixelmator Pro myself, but I do use it to make the thumbnails I post on YouTube, as well as the occasional header image for this blog (like the one at the top of this post). I've always found the app to be easy to use, yet powerful, and it absolutely flies on every Mac I've ever used it on. I've also really appreciated how good the company was at keeping the app up to date, consistently adding new features that were interesting. As he lays out in the linked post, updates have really dried up since the acquisition announcement one year ago. While the app still technically works fine, it hasn't added anything user-facing, and it is one of the few apps on my Mac stuck in "squircle jail".

Another app that was quite popular, got constant updates that users loved, and then suddenly stopped: Arc. The difference, of course is that Arc was very publicly abandoned by it's developer. It's not a great look if the difference between an app that was fully abandoned and one that was acquired by Apple is indistinguishable.

Here's hoping the future is bright for Pixelmator, even if it's not clear to the outside world what the future looks like just yet.