Apple Creator Studio and the App Store
The transition from version 14.4 of Pages, Keynote, and Numbers to version 15.1 has been confusing, to say the least. In late January, Apple released version 14.5 of all three apps, with the App Store claiming “This update contains bug fixes and performance improvements” for all three. I wonder if even that is true, given that 14.5 doesn’t appear in the version history for any of them.
The actual change in 14.5 is a dialog that appears at launch, informing the user that 14.5 will no longer receive updates and directing them to download version 15 from the App Store.
When you click the Go to App Store link in each of these dialogs, you’re taken to the appropriate page to download version 15.1. (There’s no indication of what happened to 15.0.)
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 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.Keynotevs.com.apple.iWork.Keynotefor the old one.
Apple violating their own guidelines
This Creative Studio roll-out really has highlighted how lousy and inflexible the App Store back-end is. Double versions, app updates that tell you to download other app updates, and presumably why there’s only one bundle on offer… developers knew this already of course
As a third-party dev, I expect to have to deal with things like this. But I think it really says something that Apple themselves can’t make it work better for their own apps. (Or don’t care enough to?)
The new subscription-based iWork apps are a whole new Universal Purchase SKU on the Mac App Store, ditching the old Mac-only records. The old standalone apps still exist (for now), but if you search the store you’ll find two completely different versions each of Pages, Numbers and Keynote
What are we even doing. Ads in Apple’s apps… separate versions of subscription vs non-subscription…
Steve Jobs would be running around screaming at everyone in anger.
If you were still in doubt we had reached, and passed, the end of an era at Apple: here is the nail in the coffin.
I purchased Logic Pro and Final Cut Pro via my US App Store account years ago, but my Australian account is my main account. With Logic Pro 12, it looks like it’s no longer possible for me to use that setup. Final Cut Pro still works though.
But it’s another level when the same thing happens to Apple and its own apps.
[…]
I’m also struck by the fact that Apple has had to do the App Store trick of attaching subtitles to the names of every app it makes, because the design of the App Store has led to stuffing keywords into titles becoming somehow a best practice. So it’s not Final Cut Pro anymore, it’s “Final Cut Pro: Create Video.” And Numbers is “Numbers: Make Spreadsheets.”
Another reason for the subtitles: app title metadata can’t be the same as another SKU on ANY platform. If you release “Foo” on macOS, you can’t use “Foo” on iOS or a universal app.
(We had to deal with this in Triode by using a dash, endash, and emdash on different platforms.)
Previously:
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The sad thing about the way they've rolled out the Apple Creator Studio is that is pretty much confirms that Apple will never allow developers the ability to consolidate two separate App Store listings with separate bundle ids (e.g. a Mac Store entry and an iOS App Store entry of the same app) into a single app entry.
I've been dealing with this problem on my app for a long time, having released a Mac App Store version and then releasing an iOS App Store version as different App Store entries; before Apple allowed cross-platform apps to use a single listing.
Now the app is stuck in this situation whereby the only solution is to force migration to a new app – potentially losing the existing paid customers in the process, or keeping them seperate forever.
Keeping them separate has many flow-on issues too; e.g. it impacts Family Sharing, as noted in the section "Why are two subscriptions required to support both platforms?" on https://www.magiclasso.co/insights/family-sharing/
I've submitted feedback on this years ago to Apple with no response.
Maybe the negative feedback to how Apple Creator Studio handled the problem will be some encouragement for Apple to have a second look at resolving this?
Yup. “Technical debt” is one way to look at it.
As I learned from one project: Lots of US health insurers and old businesses have this problem — many still do nightly batch runs on emulated mainframes running COBOL to get things like contractual pricing and costs. If you’ve ever tried to look up the final price of a procedure, this is why it’s not available. Providers literally don’t know the costs and can’t find them in a useful time frame (making it hard for both doctors and patients to make decisions, likely leading to higher costs overall because the feedback loop is broken).
Migrating everything from the old legacy to new would involve either too much work or such huge refactoring that it will likely mess things up. Cost and risk = keep using old systems and build on top of them.
Apple’s system probably started in the iTunes Music store days, and while some significant new additions over the years since then: apps, subscriptions, payment tiers, Mac App Store, Family sharing, etc.… I’d say we should expect things on this front to continue to change very slowly. And yeah, even Apple suffers from the limits.
The ads are very bad - not just in the startup document/template picker, but also in e.g. the slide format panel (brush icon) of keynote.
Started with AppleWorks, went to Lotus 123, then Excel, Open Office, and finally Numbers. Rarely use Pages except when someone sends me a .doc file. And, while evolving in content, I only use a spreadsheet for a personal budget since 1985. As I see it, my choices are:
-- Continue with Numbers 14.5 until Apple says I can't, ignoring the occasional popup they introduced to nag me to upgrade.
-- Upgrade to 15.1, ignoring the in-app ads like I tend to do while watching television (it very similar when you are only working with a very mature spreadsheet) along with the other UI changes.
-- Pay Apple US$120 annually (yet another tax!) to hopefully get rid of most annoyances.
-- Be diligent about saving a CSV version of everything and hope plan to migrate to LibreOffice.
For now I think option #1 is for me, but I'll start getting ready to go to option #4. Thanks Apple!
