The lack of iWork updates
The Problem: 2 Months without Liquid Glass
iOS and macOS 26.0 came out on September 15th 2025. It is almost November 2025 and iWork apps on iOS and macOS (Keynote, Numbers, and Pages) are still not updated to support the new Liquid Glass redesign, or the dark/tinted icons on macOS. āØāØIn this post, I am talking mainly about iWork, even though there are other Apple apps that also donāt support Liquid Glass, such as GarageBand. iWork is an integral part to the Mac experience. Even Microsoft files such as .docx or .pptx are opened in iWork apps by default. Hence, it is more likely more people will encounter these outdated apps compared to a niche app like GarageBand.
Indie Developers are Beating Apple
Keynote, Pages, and Numbers are apps preinstalled on iOS and macOS out of the box, and over a month into the new release cycle, the new app updates are not out. This is quite bad, because these are Apple apps, and yet they look out of place on an Apple device. Whenever I launch Pages, for example, a few things stand out as āold macOSā. For one, the window radii does not match the new ones found in apps like Safari. Another would be the flat, rectangular buttons instead of the shiny ovals found in newer apps. The biggest glare is how the icons donāt change to dark mode, while every other app in the default dock does. Very bad for visual cohesion.
Meanwhile, many indie apps from smaller developers almost immediately updated to support Liquid Glass. Even some bigger apps like Github and Slack on iOS support Liquid Glass. Appleās apps are supposed to be the poster children for showcasing the best features their operating systems have to offer to both developers and users. When iWork, over a month into the new OS release, does not showcase these features, it looks bad as best and sends a bad message to developers at worst.
The Catalyst Trade-off: Is a Single Update Worth Polishing?
There was a leak, as per Reddit, that shows Apple is likely making version 15 of iWork Catalyst based. This essentially means that on the App Store, there would be one single listing of Keynote and the listing would be compatible with iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple Watch, and Vision Pro.
Keynote on the iOS/iPadOS App Store is already compatible with iPhone, iPad, Vision Pro, and Apple Watch. Using Catalyst to put Mac into this compatibility list, I think, would make it easier for Apple in the future to port cross platform updates quicker. If iWork were already based on Catalyst, it would have probably already supported the new themed icons.
A Quick Fix vs. A Big Rewrite
But even so, I wish Apple just put out a quick compatibility update. They make it so easy for developers to adopt Liquid Glass, especially if the developer already uses native Apple APIs, which iWork uses. Apple could easily recompile the iWork apps in Xcode 26, slap in the icons from iOS, and call it a day and get back to work on the big Catalyst update. Or, maybe Apple already considered this and found it was more efficient to bundle Liquid Glass and Catalyst together.
Consumers vs. Codebases
Whatever is going on in the Apple app development team, one thing remains clear: iWork does not support Liquid Glass. Consumers donāt care about Catalyst or Appleās internal roadmaps - they care that apps by Apple that they use look wrong on their new M5 MacBook Pro.
Thank you for reading! Have a great day! Źā¢į“„ā¢Źļ¾ā”