Sporadic "license check" failure at startup
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We run Cookie on two different machines: one iMac and one MacBook Pro.
Cookie was originally purchased on the iMac, and has no apparent problems there.
This also used to be the case with the MacBook, but unfortunately starting a couple of months ago Cookie has not launched reliably upon login. Sometimes it comes up without a hitch, with the icon showing up immediately. Other times (most of them as of late), the icon doesn't show up, but instead I get a popup (image attached) stating:
"Sign in to us this application on this computer"
"'Cookie' was purchased using App Store on another computer. To install 'Cookie' on this computer, sign in using the Apple ID and password used to purchase it."
I can resubmit my password each time (bringing up my password manager, copying the password, closing the Cookie window), however this is getting to be a bit of a nuisance.
Any hints here? I've tried completely reinstalling the entire application (including preferences) several times, with no apparently effect.
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Not that I've seen. Having said that, Cookie is started more frequently than any of those, save the OS, and is the only one that's flagged to start at login.
I've just checked a few other AppStore apps. All but one came up without prompting. The other one, an older game that I haven't launched in months, resulted in the same popup. Rebooting, the popup wasn't required for the game when launched a second time. Given that Cookie launch doesn't fail every time either, I'm not sure that anything can be said definitively yet, save for the fact that the problem doesn't seem to occurring across all apps.
I'll also scout around and see if there has been any reported issues in the OSX forums.
After another reboot, Cookie launch failed with the popup … as did that other game program. At this point, this seems to be a problem with the OSX installation, rather than with Cookie specifically.
Searching around a bit more, it appears that an OSX reinstallation from the recovery partition has resolved this issue for at least one other person. I'll pursue this angle further.
Thanks.
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No dice - a reinstall of the OS didn't help matters. I then thought that it might be a cookie that Apple sets (porco.apple.com - appleID), but marking that as a favorite didn't help.
I'm not convinced that this is necessarily a Cookie issue, but unfortunately it is impacting Cookie more than any other application that I'm running. I'll see what the Apple OSX forums have to say, but worst-case scenario I'll likely have to remove Cookie and simply rely upon the cookie management that comes with Firefox.
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The App Store forums produced nothing at all, however I've found a workaround that seems to be holding: apparently if I wait for thirty seconds to a minute past the time that I get the login prompt, Cookie magically comes up. If however I login immediately after I get the prompt, I can cause the failure each time.
My hunch is that there's some license-check timeout that's happening here, at least in the case where an app isn't purchased on the same computer on which it's installed. If the app can't "phone home" in time (say due to latency induced by startup load), the check gives up and forces a revalidation.
This started happening on Mountain Lion a couple of months ago, so it seems likely to be related to an OSX patch that Apple made. There's a good chance that I'll move to Mavericks in a week or two, so it will be interesting if the problem magically goes away.
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Either you've made a related change in the last couple of updates or the licensing gods have smiled upon me: I just (unwittingly) ran a bootup load scenario that would have definitely caused problems before. Cookie came up with no problems, whereas that game app that had similar problems failed to start just as it did before.
Either way, thanks much for looking into this.
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I apparently spoke too soon - we're back to the same behavior as before, even when I'm launching Cookie manually (not automatically at startup).
At this point, barring some insights, I'm likely just going to have to deal with it until I get the laptop upgraded to Mavericks. Perhaps that will solve the problem, if only as a side-effect.
Thanks again.
