Man, I don’t think this will be good for users.
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.