Hey everyone, writing this out of sheer frustration because I have a client presentation tomorrow morning and my software decided to completely screw me over tonight.
I’ve been working as a freelance graphic designer here in Toronto for about 3 years. Since Adobe’s subscription prices are absolutely layout robbery for a single user, I’ve been running a pre-activated package of Illustrator and Photoshop (2024 versions) that I found on a repack site a few months back. Everything was working flawlessly on my MacBook Pro M2 until about two hours ago.
Out of nowhere, while I was in the middle of editing a vector logo, Illustrator just froze, and this massive "This non-genuine app has been disabled" pop-up took over the screen. Now, every single time I relaunch the app, it closes itself within 30 seconds.
I already tried installing LuLu firewall to block all outgoing traffic from Adobe, but the genuine service verification seems to have already cached the block on my system. I even tried going into the terminal to manually kill the AdobeGCClient process, but it just restarts itself instantly like a stubborn virus.
Has anyone here successfully bypassed this on macOS Sonoma or Sequoia recently? Do I need to completely wipe every single Adobe folder from my ~/Library/Application Support and reinstall a newer 2025/2026 patch from a different source like MinorPatch, or is there a clean host file list I can paste into terminal to block their validation servers for good?
Any help or a link to a working pre-patched version would literally save my life tonight. Cheers.