Today’s Question: I’ve been getting a popup window telling me that an Adobe application (it doesn’t tell me which one) is not genuine and will be disabled if I don’t buy a license. But I have a Creative Cloud subscription! How can this issue be resolved?
Tim’s Quick Answer: If one or more of the Adobe applications you have installed gets flagged as non-genuine when you do have a valid Creative Cloud subscription, you can use the Creative Cloud Cleaner tool to resolve the issue.
More Detail: Full disclosure: today’s question was not from a reader, but from myself! I ran into a (very frustrating) experience last week where several of the Adobe applications I have installed were flagged as non-genuine, and I got repeated threats that the applications would be disabled soon.
A button in the alert leads to a page offering you the opportunity to buy Adobe software, but without any real information on how to resolve the issue when the software you have installed is genuine.
So, I spent (wasted) some time in a chat with Adobe customer support. They were able to provide a list of which applications were considered non-genuine on my computer. As you can imagine, the applications in question had been installed using Adobe’s Creative Cloud application, through the account that I pay for that includes the full suite of Adobe applications.
Despite having installed the applications in the usual (and legitimate) way, they were somehow flagged as being non-genuine. Customer support was not able to provide any information on how the applications could have been flagged when they were legitimate.
While customer support was able to provide a solution, that solution involved using their Creative Cloud Cleaner tool, which requires uninstalling all Adobe Creative Cloud applications. That meant I then had to spend (waste) considerable time installing multiple Adobe applications again.
The only saving grace was that I did not lose my preferences or other settings as part of this process. But I don’t appreciate the inconvenience when I’ve only used Adobe’s Creative Cloud application to install legitimate applications as part of a subscription that I pay for (no, I don’t get a free Creative Cloud account from Adobe).
It is obviously frustrating to have had to put the time into resolving this issue. It is also frustrating that customer support couldn’t provide any information on what might have caused this issue. So, if any Adobe employees reading this know what happened, I’d love to know so I can perhaps make sure this issue is never repeated in the future!
