Back in 2008, when Apple first opened the iOS App Store, the Apple headlines were full of basement developers reporting unparalleled, million-plus sales. It was easy to chalk that app shopping frenzy up to iPhone fever, but I wondered: would developers do as well when the Mac App Store launched, especially if they’d been selling their wares on Macs for years?
Apparently so. Pixelmator has just announced that they have chalked up $1 million in their first 20 days on the Mac App Store.
Pixelmator is probably the cream of the crop of Photoshop alternatives. A lightweight image manipulation tool with support for layers, layer groups, gradients, transform tools and even 64-bit optimization, Pixelmator is currently on sale for $29.99 on the Mac App Store… several hundred dollars less than what a copy of Photoshop would cost you, and for most people, almost as good.
It’s a fantastic product for people who want something more elegantly Mac-like than GIMP but who don’t quite need Photoshop’s more esoterically advanced feature set (let alone price). The incredible success Pixelmator is enjoying makes me wonder if we can expect the Mac App Store to turn the spotlight on other lesser known alternatives to prestige apps and turn their developers into over night millionaires.
