Hi, my application is damaged and I wonder if my files will be accessible if I reinstalled it ?
Yes, just install a fresh copy over it. Your data is stored in a different location.
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“Damage” is unusual and should be concerning. What caused the damage?
Hopefully whatever caused the damage did not spread beyond Scrivener and that you have backups in case that happened.
In this case, it is most likely Apple using the word rather broadly. We most often see this warning if something has gone wrong with the Mac App Store DRM and how it handles certificate expiry. When everything runs smoothly, the certificate that authenticates your purchase, or your mechanical receipt, is periodically refreshed by the App Store infrastructure. If something goes wrong, your receipt ends up looking invalid, or “damaged”. The advice given in the dialogue box to reinstall is the fix, as that forces the App Store to refresh everything.
How that happens can be a bit of a mystery. It might not even be something that went wrong on your end. There was a case a while back when Apple forgot to renew the master store certificate before it expired, and pretty much everyone had to reinstall everything. That was a fun month for support.
But, it is a blanket warning, and can mean anything that fundamentally breaks the integrity of the software, too. So that can in theory include malicious events, making it a bit of an umbrella warning worth taking seriously, where the safest course of action is to ensure you have the canonical version of the software installed.
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