Joe Rossignol, reporting for MacRumors:

Apple might be preparing iPad apps for Pixelmator Pro, Compressor, Motion, and MainStage, according to new App Store IDs uncovered by MacRumors contributor Aaron Perris. All four of the apps are currently available on the Mac only…

It is also unclear when Apple would announce these iPad apps. The annual Final Cut Pro Creative Summit is typically held in November, and Apple occasionally times these sorts of announcements with the conference, but the next edition of the event is postponed until spring 2026. However, an announcement could still happen at any time.

I forgot about Pixelmator Pro, an app I love so much it’s one of my few “essential Mac apps” listed in this blog’s colophon. I was worried about Pixelmator’s demise after last year’s acquisition by Apple, and so far, my worst fears have come true. Here’s what I wrote last November, comparing Pixelmator to Dark Sky, a beloved third-party weather app that was rolled into iOS 14:

Proponents of the acquisition have said that Apple would probably just build another version of Aperture, which it discontinued just about a decade ago, but I don’t buy that. Apple doesn’t care about professional creator-focused apps anymore. It barely updates Final Cut Pro and Logic Pro and barely puts any attention into the Photos app’s editing tools on the Mac. I loved Aperture, but Apple stopped supporting it for a reason: It just couldn’t make enough money out of it. If I had to predict, I see major changes coming to the Photos app’s editing system on the Mac and on iOS in iOS 19 and macOS 16 next year, and within a few months, Apple will bid adieu to Photomator and Pixelmator. It just makes the most sense: Apple wants to compete with Adobe now just as it wanted to with AccuWeather and Foreca in 2020, so it bought the best iOS native app and now slowly will suck on its blood like a vampire.

After Dark Sky was acquired in 2020, the app remained without a single update until its retirement at the end of 2022. The largest omission was iOS 14 widgets, which absolutely would have been added had Dark Sky remained independent. But Apple just added hyperlocal weather forecasting to the iOS 14 weather app that summer and left Dark Sky to die a slow, painful death. Pixelmator Pro has received an update since its acquisition, but only to support Apple Intelligence, which nobody uses. Pixelmator Pro has always been available on the first day of a new macOS release, but this year, Pixelmator Pro’s macOS 26 Tahoe update is absent. The app doesn’t support Liquid Glass and sticks out like a sore thumb compared to its peers. When Pixelmator was a third-party company, it literally did a better job of blending in with Apple apps than it does as a first-party subsidiary.

This all gives me flashbacks to Dark Sky. If the Pixelmator team had any ounce of independence inside Apple, they’d have a macOS Tahoe-compliant version of all of their apps on Day 1. But they don’t, probably because they’ve been rolled into the Photos team and are busy building macOS 27, just as I predicted last year. The potential iPad version came as a surprise to me, and while I would’ve believed it had Pixelmator been an independent company, I have no faith that Apple even cares about Pixelmator enough to dedicate resources to an iPad version of Pixelmator Pro. It doesn’t even support Liquid Glass. Once Apple updates the whole Pixelmator suite — which I doubt will ever happen — then we’ll see, but for now, I treat this rumor with immense skepticism.

This kerfuffle got me thinking about Photoshop and Lightroom replacements for the Mac, and one of Pixelmator’s only competent competitors is Affinity. Canva, the online graphic design web app company, bought Affinity last spring for “several hundred million pounds” but allows the company to run independently, pushing updates to its paid-upfront suite of Mac apps. Affinity’s apps have always functioned just like the Adobe suite, except built using native-Apple programming tools like Metal. They don’t have the Mac-focused design Pixelmator does – which is why I prefer using Pixelmator Pro for nearly all of my photo editing needs — but Affinity Photo is familiar to any Photoshop user. This week, Canva announced all of the Affinity apps would be rolled into one, and the new Affinity Studio app would be available free of charge to everyone with a Canva account. Here’s Jess Weatherbed, reporting for The Verge on Thursday:

After acquiring Serif last year, Canva is now relaunching its Adobe-rivaling Affinity creative suite as a new all-in-one app for photo editing, vector illustration, and page layouts. Unlike Affinity’s previous Designer, Photo, and Publisher software, which were a one-time $70 purchase, Canva’s announcement stresses that the new Affinity app is “free forever” and won’t require a subscription.

It’s currently available on Windows and Mac, and will be coming to iPad at some point in the future. Affinity now uses “one universal file type” according to Canva, and includes integrations that allow users to quickly export designs to their Canva account. Canva Premium subscribers will also be able to use AI-powered Canva editing tools like image generation, photo cleanup, and instant copy directly within the Affinity app.

This is obviously sustainable because the Canva web app is Canva’s money-maker. People pay and vouch for Canva, especially amateur designers who have no Photoshop or Illustrator experience. This is one of the few acquisitions in recent years that I think has benefited consumers, making a powerful Photoshop rival free to anyone who can learn how to use it. (I kid about the last part, but only mostly. Learning Photoshop is a skill, so much so that it’s taught at some community colleges as a course.) If Pixelmator Pro eventually goes south – which I truly hope isn’t the case — the Affinity Studio app looks like a suitable replacement, especially if and when it comes to the iPad. The Photoshop for iPad app has always been quite lackluster, and having a professional photo editor on the iPad would make it a more valuable computer for many.