Dear beta users,
this BETA release is also about
continuing in new licensing backend development with several changes done also on client’s side. Therefore, we would like to give you more details about it in order to help you with its understanding as well as helping you to provide more specific feedback to it. As we are talking about licensing and subscription,
possible issues may impact mainly the product edition, its expiration day and installed components.
The original licensing backend system we call „Legacy“ and the new one is „Alpha“. In order to know against which of those backends is the client running, please look at the
„C:\Program Files\AVAST Software\Avast\setup\config.def“ and find the „[Alpha]” string by following parameter “
Enabled” followed by value
[0,1] (
0 means
disabled,
1 means
enabled, missing marameter means
disabled). Please note that any manual changes to this file will be invalidated by not matching the content with its signature and the new one will be downloaded.
You mas also find the difference in look of the
Subscription page in the
Settings of the product (see the screenshots).
Legacy licensing in client | Alpha licensing in client |
| |
Now, our goal for this BETA regading licensing is to
enable the Alpha backend against clients with Free and Trial editions. The Paid one are already running against Alpha for a while. Enabling the alpha for those remaining will be done gradually so it may happen you will not run against the Alpha from the first day of releasing this BETA – we will inform you when the whole BETA channel will be switched once we are confident enough it works. This applies to already installed clients as well as new installations.
Scenarios that somehow trigger communication with license backend are the following:
1. Installing Free or Trial edition
2. Registering Free edition
3. Trial or Paid expiration
4. Downgrading to Free (from Trial or Paid)
5. Activating Free by Trial (e.g. from banner)
6. Activating by existing Paid (activation code or license file)
7. Purchasing Antivirus or other products (such as Passwords, SecureLine or Cleanup) directly from the application
Please note that there are more variants and combinations, but those are the basic ones. Also note that migration of existing one without any manual change of the client subscription will be done gradually from our side as mentioned above. Known issues in licensing against Alpha:
1. After accepting offer for higher edition you might be switched back to previous edition
2. If you have one license for more products, then all are visible in Settings -> Subscription page even if they are not installed
3. There is no possibility to choose specific license when inserting old license file which contains more licences for the same product (e.g. two licenses for Antivirus Internet Security)
4. Conversion to Free edition does not work for blacklisted/refunded licenses
5. In some cases you might end up with multiple Free licenses instead of just one
6. Some redundant calls from client to new backend (with no visible impact to you)
In case of any issue we would appreciate problem report with the following
files for further debugging:
- %ProgramData%\AVAST Software\Persistent Data\Avast\Logs\Setup.log
- %ProgramData%\AVAST Software\Persistent Data\Avast\Logs\Update.log
- %ProgramData%\AVAST Software\Avast\log\AvastSvc.log
- %ProgramFiles%\AVAST Software\Avast\setup\config.def
Thank you for your help, we appreciate it!