Why doesn’t Apple’s Pages compete with Canva or Express?

Apple has such a big and unexplored growth opportunity for services in its Pages app that I’m surprised it hasn’t explored it yet. It’s an app you’ll find inside every Apple device, the people who use it love it, and it could feasibly be extended to compete with Canva, Adobe Express, or even ChatGPT.

Building on what’s there

I applauded from my keynote seat way back when Apple CEO Steve Jobs introduced Pages within the iWork suite. The suite eventually became the set of free Office-compatible productivity apps we all know and love.

At that time, Apple understood the need to provision its platforms with powerful, nice to use creative tools. It sought leverage to convince Microsoft to keep Office on Macs, but also wanted its customers to enjoy the story line and to be able to live in an Apple universe.

I make a lot of use of these apps, particularly Pages, which I still think is one of the nicest consumer level apps for quick and easy leaflet and poster design.

You don’t have to look at the posters on too many notice boards to find out that a lot of other people make use of Pages for poster design, as well.

But lots of people are now using Canva and Express for the same thing.

Why leave this money on the table?

Is there no way for Apple to transform Pages into an equivalent service?

The company seems to have the tools in place to do so. It has its own image and audio editing apps. It has its own artificial intelligence systems in development or already in use. It has Image Playground and Genmoji and could even offer its customers some kind of marketplace within which to trade image assets, such as custom-designed fonts, graphics, and more.

It has the infrastructure to support such markets already in place. It even has Shortcuts, which it is reportedly working on turning into verbal Siri commands that can be stacked like any other conversational chatbot.

Mix it all together, add a dose of user interface design, add a dribble of Spatial Computing UI design so that it becomes possible to easily design custom graphics and other documents while wearing a visionOS device and that’s a service worth using.

It builds nicely on the support for Writing Tools Apple recently delivered to Pages.

Is there a business model?

Is there a way to monetize the service while still offering Pages for free?

Of course there is. If you’re as familiar with Pages as I am you’ll know that the number of templates inside the application rarely changes. Then, if you look at Canva or Express, you’ll also see a limited number of template designs are made available for free, with others being made available at a cost.

You can usually access templates for an a la carte fee or enjoy total access if you’re willing to subscribe to those services.

Apple could do the same thing, offering up Pages as a free app in its current form, but also providing powerful online creative tools as a free service, supplemented by access to additional templates, features, and creative assets for a fee.

That fee could be rolled within the Apple One service and could be offered as a higher-end service as an alternative to Fitness+, which we all currently subscribe too in the highest end package. I don’t know about you, but I rarely use Fitness+ but would definitely make use of an online Pages service that enabled me to create a wider number of beautifully designed documents.

I think lots of people would.

Access to the service could also be sold into education and enterprise markets with the core service supplemented by support for third-party asset design and distribution services, within which Apple could also provide its own marketplace and its own assets.

Apple hasn’t done this yet, and it’s possible that the company’s own market studies don’t show huge demand for such a service, but from my own perspective, I feel like transforming Pages (and the rest of the iWork suite) into a real Express competitor would be attractive to a lot of people, particularly as those creations would be protected by Apple’s security and privacy guarantees.

Would you use a service like this?

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