This is not a proper solution. I mentioned we get too many customer support tickets with verified trials and it's our business decision not to do that.
Instead of brushing a customer request away, please consider improving your application and implementing something more secure than checking if a file exists in a pretty common location on the system. There are simple ways to make this more hidden than it is.
Improved unverified trial implementationAnswered
Hi, we are running unverified trials because the alternative was generating too many customer support tickets.
However, the unverified trials are surprisingly easy to workaround. I don't want to post the details here but we got a customer report about how to get “forever trials” on OSX.
Can you consider implementing something a bit better hidden than the current solution?
Unverified trials are a deprecated method. They have documented flaws (see the page I linked to). One of the flaws you ran into. There is no way to make unverified trials “better”. Other than switching to verified trials, which fix the flaws of unverified trials (but also have their own tradeoffs; again, documented in the article I linked to).
I'm not brushing your request away. We've given this a lot of thought. We've designed both systems. And we've extensively documented the trade-offs between the systems. We also wrote it down in our documentation (hence the link). There's not a whole lot of use copying-and-pasting the exact same reasoning we already spent a lot of time designing, documenting, and editing, but just in a forum post.
Unverified trials are a dead-end technologically. They have their very limited use-cases. And they will get 0 of our development-time going forward.
Use verified trials.
I would second this. Please correct me if I am wrong, free trial activation is failing due to the VM issue which is also causing problems withTurboActivate on Windows 11. At least with TurboActivate we can set the key to work on VM as a last resort, this is not an option for the free trial. If I am correct in this, it means the verified trials are essentially broken on Windows 11?
Nope. A hypervisor is a VM. It can be turned off: https://wyday.com/limelm/help/faq/#in-vm
Okay there is a workaround, but in practice it is not feasible. The first time use for our software cannot be:
1) try and install with default windows 11 settings
2) fails, get in contact with our support
3) go through a complex process (for somone not so familiar with computers) changing core windows settings, many are not willing to do this.
In general it incurs unacceptable reputational damange for our software to be failing to initialise free trials in what is now the majority of use cases (Windows 11 users).
You can allow VMs in your version which will allow verified trials on VMs. It's completely in your control.
Thanks for highlighting this, for some reason I did not clock setting the VM at the version level would also affect free trials as well as the keys. Cheers!
No problem, glad to help.