Apple Has Hidden the Pre-Creator-Studio Versions of Keynote, Numbers, and Pages in the Mac App Store

Ryan Christoffel, 9to5Mac:

On the iPhone and iPad, Apple made the new Creator Studio features available as updates to the existing App Store releases.

On the Mac though, the rollout was a lot more confusing. Apple kept the old iWork apps for Mac available on the App Store and launched entirely separate iWork versions with the Creator Studio features. Starting today, though, that oddity is no more. Per Aaron Perris, Apple has officially removed the old Pages, Keynote, and Numbers apps from the App Store.

If you’ve previously downloaded these apps, you’ll still find them in your download history and can re-download from there. But new users will only see one option on the App Store: the Creator Studio-compatible apps.

One reason — perhaps the reason? — this was necessarily more complex on MacOS is that the iWork apps used to have different bundle identifiers on iOS and Mac. On the Mac, the old (classic?) version of Keynote has the bundle identifier com.apple.iWork.Keynote. On iOS, it was always just com.apple.Keynote, without the iWork part. To make the single-subscription bundle work across both platforms, Apple seemingly needed to unify the bundle IDs, and they unified them using the iOS versions, sans the iWork part. The new Creator Studio versions of the Mac apps now have the same bundle IDs as the iOS versions. You can see this using Terminal, if, like me, you currently have both versions of these apps installed side-by-side:

% mdls -name kMDItemCFBundleIdentifier -r \
    /Applications/Numbers.app 

Result: com.apple.iWork.Numbers

% mdls -name kMDItemCFBundleIdentifier -r \
    /Applications/Numbers\ Creator\ Studio.app

Result: com.apple.Numbers

You can also see from the above that while the display names for the new versions remain just “Keynote”, “Numbers”, and “Pages”, the actual names of the .app bundles in the file system are now “Keynote Creator Studio.app”, “Numbers Creator Studio.app”, and “Pages Creator Studio.app”. That’s how two apps that both appear to have the same name can exist next to each other in the same Applications folder.

I’ll leave the final word to Basic Apple Guy:

Goodbye Keynote, Numbers, and Pages, and long live Keynote: Design Presentations, Numbers: Make Spreadsheets, and Pages: Create Documents

Tuesday, 14 April 2026