I’ve have a few users recently where all of there plugins were uninstalled for no apparent reason.
I just had another case of this and the user said it happened after hurricane Idalia when they lost power and internet. They launched Photoshop without internet to get some work done with their generator. They have no way to connect with internet to reactivate my plugins. They have cell phone access to post to me. So maybe they could use it temporarily as an internet hot spot to activate.
Not sure why Creative Cloud is removing the plugins. The loss of internet seems that it may be linked to it in some way. I really don’t want me plugins to require internet to run, so I hope issue this isn’t related to the plugin licensing system project that is being developed.
I’ve had a few users report this issue. No clue as to the root cause – it clearly has nothing to do with the code in my plugin since the install process is handled by Adobe/Creative Cloud – and in my case users lose their saved data related to the plugin as well, which is a massive inconvenience since they set up pretty complex operations inside of it.
I have forwarded the cases to Adobe and haven’t heard anything back as to the root cause.
UPDATE: This is becoming an increasingly more common, annoying problem for me. I’ve received dozens of emails from users of our plugin having problems like this. I get a few per week like clockwork reporting a problem like this. The most common problems include: “I acquired the plugin through the Adobe Exchange, but can’t install it and it doesn’t show up in my Plugins section”, or “I have an active subscription to your plugin but it doesn’t show up in the Plugins section anywhere and I can’t install it”, or “The plugin was suddenly removed from Photoshop/the Creative Cloud application and I can’t use it anymore.”
It’s particularly annoying because I have to waste my time doing customer support work on behalf of Adobe when their applications are malfunctioning. I have also received negative reviews on my plugin’s listing page because the Adobe platform itself is malfunctioning (ie, my plugin gets blamed for the Creative Cloud application having errors, bugs, plugin installation defects, etc.)
I typically just provide some general tips and ideas like, check Creative Cloud + Photoshop for updates, restart the CPU, then I just loop in the Adobe Exchange Support Team into the email chains and see if they can help.
I get this too occasionally. Usually it ends up being a Photoshop issue. Uninistalling/reinstalling Ps sometimes works, or waiting for a new Ps update (which is probably the same thing).