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

Joe Rosensteel, writing at Six Colors, regarding the demise of Apple’s Clips app:

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?

Rosensteel is concerned about the radio silence from Apple regarding Pixelmator and Photomator, the apps (and team) that Apple acquired a year ago:

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.

That’s what I hope: that Apple is somewhere near the cusp of announcing some sort of “pro apps” subscription.

★ Monday, 27 October 2025