Wesley Hilliard, writing for AppleInsider regarding Edits, Meta’s pre-announced mobile-first video editing app:
Despite that, many apps and features on iPhone toe the line between fun tool and social platform. One of those tools was Clips, which arrived in 2017 to little fanfare and has been forgotten since.
Meta and ByteDance have a reason to push their respective video editing apps — brand synergy. More users mean more data, more content, and more ad revenue. Apple, however, doesn’t have the same motivation.
While Apple would likely love to see users flock to Clips, it would mean entering a race to satisfy a wave of several million customers in an app and interface that was never really more than a proof of concept. It would be a money pit with very little reward as Apple doesn’t have a social platform to drive users to or a way to monetize the app.
I completely agree with Hilliard that the announcement of Edits is the perfect time to mention Clips. I completely disagree with him that Apple has no motivation to dedicate itself to the task of making Clips incredible.
A mobile-first video isn’t a “money pit”. It’s an app. Apple makes a lot of apps, and they could easily afford to assign a team to make Clips truly great. It’s no different than 20–25 years ago, when Apple dedicated itself to making iMovie and Final Cut both great apps. It’s no different than the motivation to create GarageBand. The monetization wouldn’t be direct; it would be downstream of the general idea that if you’re editing videos for social media on your phone, the best app to do it with from Apple and it’s exclusively available on iPhone. The idea is that Apple doesn’t just make the best computing devices for artists, writers, and creators, but they also make some of the best apps for those fields too.
There are actually a lot of interesting UI ideas in Clips. But if Apple isn’t interested in making Clips truly great for people who actually love editing videos using their phones, they should just abandon it. Make it great or give up. Keeping it around as an also-ran that no one uses is a bad look. This is the sort of thing Apple should pride itself on: best-of-breed creative tools.
I don’t know if Edits is a rip-off of CapCut or not, but it’s definitely not a rip-off of Clips. It’s a good rule of thumb that when Apple succeeds at something, it gets ripped off. The better the Apple product, the more shamelessly it gets copied. Apple should make Clips into a iOS video editing app that everyone rips off shamelessly.
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