There are some rumors doing the rounds about Apple Inc.’s plans to release a new app in the Mac App Store. The rumors come from Apple Weetjes, a dutch website, which claimed through its anonymous sources that Apple might release the app titled iPhoto ’12 for the Mac App Store this summer. The website also claimed that this new photo editing app will be inspired by the newly released iPhoto for iOS.
If these rumors are indeed true then the timing of the app’s release will raise a few eye brows. Apple we know is a company that prides itself on having built an entire ecosystem of hardware and software, they build everything from scratch and often end up being trend setters while at the same time establishing bench marks for others to follow. Another thing they pride themselves on are their market dominating software products. So when they launch a new product it sparks interests and speculation all around. But this could be different.
By now everyone who has surfed the internet in the past 1 month is likely to be aware of the Instagram story. Perhaps the most popular free photo app in the world today, Instagram started its journey on the iOS back in October 2010, and notched up 1 million users by December that year, it then surpassed 10 million users the following September and recently after it launched on Android it picked up 5 million users in the first six days of launch taking its total tally past 40 million users which is about 5 percent of Facebook’s total active user base, no wonder Facebook scooped it up. But what this success story did was that it left Apple red faced, the app which was recently an Apple-only-app served as a testament to Apple’s success in the app arena. But when they went to the rival camp, the Facebook acquisition and all the hype around it, helped it gather a lot of early momentum on Android and thus it was an instant success on the Android platform.
So introducing a new iPhoto ’12 app when there already exists a more than useful iPhoto app sounds interesting. Let’s consider a couple of scenarios –
- Is Apple trying to send a quite yet strong message across to Kevin Systrom and company?
- or are they simply doing what they do best, innovate and add more quality and value to the way its users interact with Apple products?
In either case if the rumors about what the new iPhoto ’12 app will offer are true, it will be interesting to note whether this new launch can actually have an adverse effect on Instagram’s growing popularity. Here’s what Apple’s iPhoto app recently introduced for the iPad offers –
- Smart browsing, brushes, wireless photo beaming, and photo journals.
- Â iPhoto for iPad will also support up to 19-megapixel photos, while the new app adds the following to the iPhoto capabilities,
- it will allow users to edit photos with multi-touch gestures and utilize professional-quality effects.
- it will also allow users to create a photo album and share it via iCloud. Â This would replace the MobileMe gallery function currently found in iPhoto.
Randy Ubillos, chief architect of photo and video apps at Apple, called it a “reinvention” of iPhoto. According to the dutch website’s sources the iPhoto ’12 app will be available for both the iPhone as well as the iPad.  Their report said that the new version will be available on Apple’s OS X 10.7 Lion or OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion, but excludes support for OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard.
Whether it’s their never ending desire to keep themselves ahead of their competition or whether it is a need to suppress their competition, nobody does it better than Apple. And if the new app does see the light of the day, the only one’s to benefit will be Apple’s users, since they will now have a great alternative to their favorite Instagram app.
The difference between a company which makes its own products (Apple) and another (Google) which lets its product (Android) be manipulated by a plethora of manufacturers comes across quite clearly here. Apple can make an iPhoto app and reap the benefits through its own app store on its own iPhones and iPads (both of which run on iOS) but Google (more specifically Android) still has to rely on third parties (for example Instagram) when it comes to providing once-in-a-generation apps for their Google Play store.
