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.
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.
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).
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.
There are many acquisitions that lead to better products.
They're more lucrative for creators/streamers and have further reach but the platform experience is noticeably worse.
I'm tossing up between pixelmator and affinity photo.
The main changes were integration of Apple's AI stuff and improved VoiceOver support. Nothing earth-shattering but it's still active.
