Does anyone’s paid app have a command line tool associated with it (eg for use on CI)? If so, do you do anything to check licensing on the command line tool, or do you just hope your users stay honest?
Oct 13, 2026, 1:57 PM@amyworrall Kaleidoscope did. Don’t think we verified anything. Might’ve been sandboxed/App Store? I forget now.
@robrix @amyworrall Ksdiff mostly just shuttled paths to the main app, no?
@robrix @amyworrall to make my comment more clear in how that relates… the CLI tool didn’t do much on its own so there wasn’t value in doing a license check there.
Oct 13, 2026, 5:48 PM@rickfillion @amyworrall yes, I think that's correct. the only (mildly, if that) tricky bit was IPC, it didn't have any features of its own.
Oct 13, 2026, 2:28 PM@amyworrall bbedit has a command line tool, but I'm not sure what happens with licensing
@acf I guess for many apps the command line tool isn’t the ‘secret sauce’.
Mine will have the convert svg to sf symbol part of McKinley, as well as the bits of the workflow that work with McKinley docs.
But maybe I’m over thinking. Honest people will still pay for stuff either way right?
Oct 13, 2026, 2:46 PM@amyworrall And you're concerned people might just use (the command line part) of a free trial of Mckinley forever because only the GUI app checks the license ?
@acf more concerned someone will start passing it round the net as “just use this on your CI”.
Oct 13, 2026, 3:50 PM@amyworrall 👍🏻 seems a reasonable fear but I don’t have anything useful to offer in terms of license checking
@amyworrall Amore checks the state of the subscription on the CLI for commands that require it.
I am not a big fan of it but don’t know how else I could do it.
The CLI is very powerful.
@lucaslove is there a way with Amore Licensing to check the validity of a key but without taking up a device slot? I wouldn’t want a CLI use to count as one of your computer uses, but I could still validate the key is valid…
@amyworrall this is currently not supported, but it could be.
Can you DM me about what you have in mind?
@amyworrall my app has a quicklook extension that checks the validity of the Amore license key (no networking). Key is entered into app and saved in the keychain, which is the only way to share data with a quicklook extension.