Does anyone have pro’s or con’s for me to either buy scrivener through the Mac App Store for my MacBook Air, or is it better to download the latest scrivener version from the literature and latte website directly? Also, can either way of downloading it to my MacBook provide an opportunity to also use scrivener on my iPad? Thanks!
And if I’m not mistaken, when there is an update to Scrivener, those who bought directly from L&L get an upgrade discount (I think 40%?)
Someone from L&L can confirm this when they return from holiday.
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There’s actually an official statement discussing this question:
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Almost forgot: “The direct-sale versions of our software have been designed to look for Apple’s proof of purchase certificates on your computer. So long as you have run the Mac App Store version at least once, you will be able to run the regular version as fully activated software, rather than in demo mode.”
(But probably not in the opposite direction.)
Correct, not in the opposite direction.
In fact, the App Store version will refuse to install if it detects an existing direct sale installation.
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Did anyone actually attempt this? I mean, outside of testing… like a customer who wanted to enjoy more limitations later on.
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It’s fairly common, actually.
Typically, what happens is the customer installs the trial version from our site, then decides they want to purchase via the App Store. So they give the App Store money, but don’t actually install the App Store version. When the trial eventually expires, they contact us to try to “recover their license key.” Which, being an App Store purchaser, they don’t have.
To recover their access to Scrivener, they have to install the App Store version, and to do that they have to de-install the trial.
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Holy moly! Didn’t even consider this scenario. But makes sense.
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Thank you very much.
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FYI there is another way, apart from the AppStore and the direct download, you can install it with the very capable 3rd party package manager, HomeBrew.
If you use HB as package manager for macOS, you can do this in terminal:
“$ brew install --cask scrivener”
Current version: 3.4,16639,1013
I assume you put your licence key in when you first run the sw.
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Yup, all the Homebrew system does is re-publish the same links we provide on our website, and package them into an installer. It then periodically checks for changes to our update files, the same ones Scrivener itself uses to check itself for updates, and broadcasts new versions to Homebrew users subscribed to it.
So it’s just a cleaner way of using the direct-sale version, or the demo, if you haven’t bought it yet.
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Hey Amber, thanks for your reply and the calrification.
HomeBrew is not a subscription btw (and I have no affiliation to it) it is free and open source just a package manager like APT, yum or pip for Python in other linux systems. So it does exactly what you described, deliver and maintain sw packages (like Scrivener) doesn’t interfere with the sw itself, rather integrates it to the underlying linux(ish) architecture and updates it regularly. The macOS for some reason doesn’t have a traditional package manager.
And yes, it is absolutely not necessary to have HB to get Scrivener (I simply downloaded it myself) I only mentioned it because it’s an option if there are users who manages macOS packages with HB.
I do mean ‘subscription’ in the broad concept of the term, not the horrific, capitalism twisted jargon that has become associated with it exclusively of late. 
One subscribes to an RSS feed, for example, in their news aggregator, to receive updates made to that feed… and that is more along the lines of what is happening in the case of installing something with Homebrew (or any other package manager that handles software updates).