I bought Scrivener for my iPad in 2018, then bought the Mac version soon after for work. Up through last Friday—so, 4+ years—Scrivener worked fine on my Mac (Catalina 10.15.7). Today, it insists I’ve been using the trial version and need to pay in order to continue using it. I know this is untrue, so I’m not sure where the error lies.
I tried uninstalling from my Mac, then reinstalling through the app store. The store shows a complete circle around the download, but doesn’t seem to have finished installing. Trying to open the app again in this state yields the same screen.
Don’t worry about that. Others had the same issue as well, and all of them had it resolved.
(You can stop reinstalling and trying to figure it out on your own. )
It is likely due to the fact that the merchant distributing the licenses was somewhat recently changed for another one.
Someone from LL will likely respond to you here in some while.
Or you can contact them directly if you wish to speed things up :
For your own protection: whatever you do, do not post details specific to your license here.
It looks to me like you may have at some point purchased the software from Apple, and later installed the direct-sale version. That can usually work fine as the direct-sale version does look for an Apple receipt and automatically unlock itself. It’s useful if you need some of its additional features that aren’t allowed in App Store software.
You would need to at least once download the MAS version and run it, to install the receipts again (evidently they got lost). And then once you’ve done that, if you wish to switch back to the direct sale version, trash it and replace it with the copy you downloaded on DMG. If that fails again you may have run into a condition where it just can’t find your receipt and you’ll need to use the MAS version.
Now as to this:
The store shows a complete circle around the download, but doesn’t seem to have finished installing. Trying to open the app again in this state yields the same screen.
Doesn’t sound like it actually uninstalled. That demo screen is impossible to see from the MAS version (built-in demos are one of the things not allowed), so if you launch Scrivener and you see that, then it’s still installed. You do need to make sure nothing in the Applications folder is called “Scrivener” before you click the download button. Apple’s installer is pretty basic, it’s not going to ask you about overwriting what’s already there or anything, and it wouldn’t surprise me if just stomps all over whatever is in the way and then silently fails.
Thank you. I’m unfortunately not tech-savvy enough to know what exactly you’re talking about. MAS? Install the receipts? Demo screen?
I’ll try really uninstalling it, checking the Applications folder like you said, and then reinstalling from the app store. Do I need to do anything else?
I sometimes have troubles installing things via the store interface for some reason. It gets all the way down to the end and then just stops. I was hoping that wouldn’t be the problem.
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