I've been thinking of buying pixelmator pro recently for photo editing. It seems like a lovely photo editing application. And they have a lifetime license.
But Apple bought the company recently. I worry that whatever made the product great will go away post acquisition. Whether or not Apple keeps working on it at the same level of quality is anyone's guess. Or maybe they'll integrate the best features into their free Photos app and ditch the rest. Or something else entirely.
I can't think of any examples where acquisitions make a product better. But dozens where the product was killed immediately, or suffered a long slow death.
Maybe some of these will work for you; Minecraft, PayPal, GitHub, Instagram, WhatsApp, LinkedIn, Android, Waze.
With Apple it's harder for me to know. How do former Dark Sky users feel about the Weather app? I think it has all the features? How about Shazam, which I never used before it became an iOS feature? TestFlight retained its identity. Beats by Dre headsets did too, though Beats Music I think became Apple Music in a way.
Some of these are hard comparisons specifically because what you are describing is really the initial exit. Acquisitions are often not funded by valuation as much as an actual plan to make money.
Something like Minecraft for an example - the existing established customer base with perpetual license was not justification for buying it. The value Microsoft saw was around things like DLC content and cosmetics, and subscription revenue through server hosting.
From what I have observed - one could say that everything Apple acquires is an accu-hire first, for a product they want to ship and trying to find a delivery-focused team to help them with that.
If the company already built a product similar to that and had it hit the market - thats great! It means that they are getting a team which has delivered successfully and maybe even have a significant head start toward Apple's MVP. That likely means also that the team will have a fair bit of autonomy too (and often retain their brands).
DarkSky's product in that light wasn't their app. It was their work on localized weather models and their weather API.
Apple's Weather App doesn't look like DarkSky, but AFAICT you could rebuild the DarkSky app on the WeatherKit REST API (including features like historical weather, and supporting alternative platforms like Android).
With the possible exception of Android (which tbh I have never used) and possibly Minecraft, it's hard to make an argument that any of those acquisitions improved the products. At best they're kept in stasis.
Facebook replaced Instagram with a completely different app, which they then made quite useful to a lot of people. (Sure, I might object to all the strings attached, but there are dimensions along which Instagram was improved – in the same way you can improve a house by bulldozing it and building a dozen single-room flats in its place.)
Github has gotten a lot more unstable (GH Actions outages every couple weeks or so), but it definitely has not been in stasis: the pace of change has been a whole lot higher since the acquisition (and I'd say generally for the better)
You'll find many (including myself) who find Microsoft's purchase of Minecraft to be a huge loss for the game. I'll admit that the acquisition wasn't the calamity people were fearing, but overall it's still been a net negative or stagnation at best.
For starters they split the community among bedrock & java. And while a minecraft copy leveraging a C++ was a good idea, it seems they've mostly made the split to justify adding heavy monetization for skins and world maps to bedrock. (Maybe they feared backlash if they did that to the OG Java version?) This monetization seems to have killed people's appetite for hobby-project mods and maps.
Likewise, it's clear that the intended demographic of their marketing has become much younger. From the mob votes, the type of things that go in updates, it seems that what's added is far less deep. That updates are now more of a social media "Llamas in minecraft, look how goofy they are!" stunt.
I recently started a 1.7.10 modded world, and was surprised to see just how much stuff was already there.
The only newer vanilla things that I found I missed were bees and slime blocks.
Maybe it's nostalgia, but this version feels nicer, like it's cohesive, and respects me as a player more.
You would be arguing wrongly YouTube today is the largest trove of knowledge accessible by the largest number of people in the world. It also has a lot of false information but overall it is one of the greatest cause of change in the world.
Would YouTube be the behemoth it is without the plethora of content (some of it, high quality)? And if it being more lucrative for creators is what got that content, I would argue the platform as a whole is better. You could have the most whizz bang video platform, but without good content, what good is that?
With the money came the greed, the over-polished mass market content, and the ecosystem of creators is now mostly driven by engagement.
Not to mention all the topics that have been soft-banned because one algorithm flags those videos as not monetizable, and the next algorithm decides that only showing or recommending videos that can show ads results in the most add revenue
I don't think YouTube is clearly better or worse than it was before acquisition, and maybe an independent YouTube would have walked the same path. It is simply a very different platform that was ship-of-theseusd
Follow some channels like Practical Engineering or Veritasium ... both good quality, information dense. Yes, decent production values, but that's not a bad thing at all in my book.
YouTube was acquired in 2006.
I do think since then things like video quality and length have improved, although you can argue the ads everwhere are bad UX.
Apple is different from Microsoft or Google in that they don’t have a monopoly to subsidize mistakes. They bought things like Logic and Final Cut because they realize that not having high-quality Mac software means that Adobe gets to choose whether professionals in those fields keep buying Macs. I would expect Pixelmator will continue to be developed to compete with Photoshop.
I have Pixelmator Pro & Photomator. They haven't meaningfully changed since Apple's acquisition, and they don't rely on any subscription or online features that could be ruined after the fact. If a future update fucks things over, you don't have to update. Everything runs locally.
But Apple bought the company recently. I worry that whatever made the product great will go away post acquisition. Whether or not Apple keeps working on it at the same level of quality is anyone's guess. Or maybe they'll integrate the best features into their free Photos app and ditch the rest. Or something else entirely.
I can't think of any examples where acquisitions make a product better. But dozens where the product was killed immediately, or suffered a long slow death.