The apps formerly known as iWork: Keynote, Pages, and Numbers received an update this week. Generally these updates aren’t that big of a deal, but this one is different, especially for macOS administrators.

The three apps formerly known as iWork have been available as standalone apps on macOS for a long time. First, as standalone paid apps, then in a bundle and then in the App Store as a one-time-purchase, later for free. They also come pre-installed on all Macs out of the box, but not after a system wipe.

Now, these three apps are joining the Apple Creator Studio bundle which includes the “Pro” apps. The existing functionality will remain free, but there are new additional features that you can unlock by purchasing the Creator Studio subscription.

The new apps bundled with the Creator Studio have the version number 15.1. Why Apple didn’t change these to the ’26’ version numbering is a mystery, as is what happened to the 15.0 release.

The update from 14.x to 15.1

There are a lot of changes for the macOS versions of these three apps. These are especially relevant to Mac admins with managed app deployments, but they will also explain some issues you may be encountering on a personally managed Mac.

While this is a standard update for the iOS, iPadOS and visionOS apps, it is actually an entirely new app for the macOS versions. To be even more precise, the upgrade process consists of an update and a new different app. Apple has published a support article explaining the process.

(The examples will be mostly for Keynote, but Pages and Numbers behave in the exact same way.)

If you had the latest version of Keynote before this Wednesday (14.4), you would see a 14.5 update in the Mac App Store with the release notes: “This update contains bug fixes and performance improvements.”

Not sure about the bug fixes and improvements, and Apple certainly doesn’t go into detail on these. Apple states that you should upgrade to 14.5 before installing and launching the 15.1 apps, so that saved passwords for protected documents are preserved correctly.

After updating to 14.5, there will also be a dialog stating that a “New Verision of Keynote Available” [sic] with a button that links to the new Keynote app in the App Store and a second button “Not Now” which allows you to ignore this for now, because, presumably you opened the app to do some work.

Fellow Mac Admin Neil Martin found a way to suppress this dialog with a configuration profile.

There is one big limitation with staying on the old version that I have encountered so far: you cannot collaborate on shared documents when one or more of the collaborators are using the 15.1 version, which is very likely when they are using iOS, iPadOS, or visionOS.

When you follow the button to download the new app from the app store, you can download the new Creator Studio version (15.1) for free. You will see a second, new app with the new icon in the Applications folder.

Differences between the apps

In the Finder the two apps look the same, except for the icon. But when you look at them in detail, there are two important differences. The new apps have a different name in the file system, which you can see in Terminal. The name in the file system is /Applications/Keynote Creator Studio.app.

This may seem cosmetic, but it will lead to broken dock items when the old version is removed. A user might be confused why Keynote is suddenly a question mark in the dock. When you are a Mac Admin who manages or even just pre-sets the dock, you may want to consider updating any dock items they might have. At the very least you will need to update scripts or profiles that set the default dock at enrollment.

When you further inspect the application bundle by looking at the Info.plist or with a tool like Apparency, you will see that the bundle identifier of the new app is com.apple.Keynote vs. com.apple.iWork.Keynote for the old one. This also has some side effects. In their support article, Apple calls out that the “Open Recent” menu will not be populated. Other customizations such as a customized toolbar may not transfer either.

Why?

The main change is that these apps now appear as a single entry across all the App Stores. You “purchase” the app once and get the app for all platforms. This has already been true for the iOS, iPadOS, and visionOS apps and now the macOS versions join that. This might simplify some things going forward.

This does not mean each platform gets the same app bundle, the actual downloaded apps are still specific and different for each platform. It is also important to point out that the 15.1 version still runs on Intel macOS.

To unify the apps into a single universal entry, Apple had to use the bundle identifier across all platforms.

Well, either that, or Apple could have updated the App Store backend to be more flexible here Apple always claims that their control over the hardware, software and services lead to a much better consumer experience. This would have been a chance to prove that.

I find it absolutely incomprehensible that Apple considers the App Store architecture, which is based on a store designed to sell songs for 99 cents more than 20 years ago, so inflexible that they would rather have their customers, administrators, and their own in-house developers jump through all these hoops.

But more on that later.

The Upsell

The apps are now part of the Creator Studio subscription bundle, so of course, there is upsell in the apps. There are big areas advertising the new themes that only come with the subscription in the dialog to create a new document. In Keynote, there is a big blue notice to “Elevate Your Presentations” in the slide inspector side bar, which thankfully does not appear in other inspectors. There are also purple toolbar items with the new features that are gated behind the subscription.

This enshittification of the app is annoying enough for consumers, but it is worse for managed deployments. Apple provides no means to purchase subscriptions for an organization. Even if you wanted to purchase the subscription for all your employees, you cannot. Instead, everyone is stuck with these garish ads and purple buttons.

Mac Admins have been asking for a way to purchase, manage, and deploy App Store subscriptions and in-App purchases for years. But again, the architecture of the App Store seems to be so inflexible, that Apple cannot provide this. Instead, they are “innovating” by placing more ads.

The Solution that misses

In their Apple Platform Deployment Guide, which was also updated this week, Apple mentions not one, but two solutions.

While the new versions of Keynote, Numbers, and Pages automatically hide these features when the Managed Apple Account appears in Settings, an additional Managed App configuration payload can be deployed using your device management service to provide the same experience for devices without a Managed Apple Account.

When the device has a Managed Apple Account signed in, the upsell ads should not show. While managed Apple Accounts (MAA) are certainly an interesting technology, their adoption among organisations has been slow, as they have very limited use cases, especially on macOS.

The other option is to add “an additional Managed App configuration payload” (also known as AppConfig) the the app deployment. This is actually a nice solution for iOS, but has one problem: while Apple’s MDM specs does allow for AppConfig when deploying Mac App Store apps to macOS, many device management systems do not implement this.

It is fair to ask why many device management services don’t offer this? Until this week, there were no important Mac Apps that used AppConfig for their configuration.

On macOS, configuration profiles have been used to configure the system and apps for more than a decade. This is familiar to admins and (most) developers. Configuration profiles have the advantage that they work for apps distributed outside the App Store, as well as App Store apps, so implementing AppConfig for macOS didn’t seem necessary, since it will not benefit most or any of the apps an admin needs to manage.

Device management service developers are focusing their resources on implementing the new modern DDM specs. It is sad that something like iOS apps on macOS and AppConfig for Mac App Store apps aren’t implemented, but the reality was, that Mac admins, their customers, weren’t asking for it. Until now, there was no need for it.

Apple ignores the reality on the ground. Instead of using an established and proven configuration method, they are using something that should work in theory. This is the cross section of managed deployments and the Mac platform, both regularly blind spots for current Apple.

Where was the beta?

If Apple had done a beta phase for the Creator Studio in AppleSeed for IT, these issues would have come up, been discussed and some of them could have been fixed. Mac admins would have had some time to prepare for the systemic issues that couldn’t be fixed and prepare and test workflows, or at the very least have support documents and communication available for the end users and support techs.

AppleSeed for IT has been successful at this for years now, providing administrators and developers early access to platform upgrades and updates with a dedicated feedback channel. But apparently, the app development teams at Apple haven’t heard of it. Or, if I may hazard a guess, the architecture of the App Store doesn’t allow for a beta deployment test phase. (There is TestFlight, but you cannot perform or test managed deployments through TestFlight.)

What should Mac Admins do?

If you are deploying the apps formely known as iWork (Keynote, Pages, Numbers), you need to do the following:

• ensure that the clients receive the 14.5 update, so that the settings that are transferred, can be transferred properly, when the new version is launched
• once all clients have the 14.5 version, disable the deployment of the old versions
• add licenses for the new apps to your volume purchasing in Apple Business or School Manager
• configure your device management service to deploy the new apps, if your management service allows this, you may have to search for the new apps using the full app store link, as these are not Mac apps, but universal app entries in the App Store
• scope the deployment to those clients that have the 14.5 version
• if your device management service can add an AppConfig or Managed Application Configuration to a Mac App Store app deployment, add the showPrompts key with a value of true.
• once the new version is installed, remove the old applications from the client
• if you are managing the dock, replace any items in the dock to match the new app file paths

Going forward

Most importantly, please file feedback through the AppleSeed channel and your AppleCare contacts on this, and what could have been done better. This is my list, but feel free to add more:

• earlier communication and a beta phase for App Store applications and bundles
• management of Creator Studio subscription nags with configuration profiles on macOS
• a better upgrade experience for macOS
• volume purchasing, deployment, and management for App Store subscriptions and in-App purchases

You also want to file feedback to your device management service, they may be able update their interfaces and workflows to make these “updates” easier in the future.

Apple may have unified nearly all of their paid apps in one subscription, and believe they are done for now. No changes to the App Store needed. But third party developers may also want to unify their app offerings and are facing the same challenges. They will model their “upgrades” after the approach Apple has taken here.

Pro apps

Thre are more apps that are a part of the Creator Studio bundle. Apple acknowledges the problems by keeping the one-time purchase versions of (most of) the apps in the App Store. For the apps that have so far been free, Apple didn’t deem this necessary.

There may be issues regarding upgrading the Pro apps, as well. There may be issues with maintaining the one-time-purchase versions going forward. I have not yet had time to dive into these. I am sure other Mac Admins will share their experiences, and I will be sure to share their posts in my MacAdmins.news weekly summary!