How do I migrate from Mac App Store Moom to direct Moom?

As you’ve no doubt read by now, Moom 4 is only available directly from Many Tricks, not from the Mac App Store. As a Mac App Store customer, if you’d like to buy Moom 4 at our discounted pricing for current Moom users, you must first migrate from the Mac App Store version of Moom 3 to a direct licensed version of Moom 3—we call that crossgrading.

After crossgrading, you can then upgrade your Moom 3 license into a Moom 4 license. But this isn’t a two-step process, as our crossgrading options do both of those things in one step, making it super easy for you to migrate from your Mac App Store version of Moom 3 and upgrade at the discounted rate to Moom 4.


If you just want to crossgrade your Mac App Store Moom 3 license to a direct Moom 3 license without upgrading, and then worry about the upgrade later, you can do that, too. First, you need to download and install the direct version of Moom 3. Once that’s done, follow these permanent crossgrade instructions. Once done, you can delete the App Store version of Moom 3.


Crossgrading may seem conceptually simple, but behind the scenes, there’s a fair bit of work going on to transform your App Store purchase into a direct Moom license. And sometimes, for reasons outside our control, that process may fail.

If you have any difficulties crossgrading, please open a ticket and we’ll provide direct one-to-one support. Feel free to try both methods of crossgrading provided here, but if you don’t want to do that, just contact us and we’ll figure it out.

Before attempting any method of crossgrading, there is one prerequisite:

You must have run the Mac App Store version of Moom 3 at least once on the Mac you’ll be using to do the crossgrade.

You’ve hopefully been using Moom 3 on the same Mac you want to upgrade to Moom 4, so this should already be done. But if you happen to have recently bought a new Mac or reinstalled macOS from scratch, run Mac Moom 3 at least once!

If you haven’t run the Mac App Store version of Moom, the crossgrade process will fail, as the required Mac App Store files won’t be present. Once you’ve done that, there are two ways to crossgrade your Mac App Store purchase to a direct license.

Two ways to crossgrade

1. Crossgrade within Moom 4

This should be the easiest method of crossgrading, as it all happens within Moom 4, and with only a few clicks and a bit of typing on your part. Assuming you’ve run Mac App Store Moom 3 at least once, download and install Moom 4 (you can overwrite Moom 3, or temporarily install Moom 4 in another folder). Launch Moom 4, and then select Moom → Buy Moom from the Moom icon in the menu bar.

In the window that opens, as seen at right, please read the explanatory text, then click the “Upgrade…” button. When you purchase the Moom 4 upgrade license, you will first be automatically crossgraded to a direct sales license, and then your new upgrade license will be applied.

The “allow a few seconds” part is important: After purchasing the upgrade, it will appear that nothing has changed. But Moom is busy in the background, verifying your original Mac App Store purchase and crossgrading your license. After a few seconds, your license information should appear. If that doesn’t happen, you can try one of the other methods below, or you can open a ticket and we’ll help solve the problem.

2. Crossgrade on our web site

If you’d prefer not to crossgrade within Moom 4, you can do so (still quite easily) outside of the app. First, buy a Moom 4 upgrade license on our site.

After completing the purchase, open your email and find a message from us with the subject of “Your Moom Upgrade License.” That email will contain a link to download your license file. Do that as soon as possible, as those links expire! After downloading, find the license file in Finder (it should end in “.moomupgradelicense”), and save a backup copy somewhere—cloud drives are a great spot.

Then double-click the license file, and Moom’s license window should appear; after a few seconds’ delay while the conversion happens, it will then display your applied license. Assuming that happens, you can delete the downloaded file (Moom automatically creates a copy in the right location), and you’re good to go. If the license still didn’t apply—or if you never received the license file email—you can try one of the other methods below, or just open a ticket and we’ll figure out the problem.


What to do if the crossgrade fails

One of the two above methods should work for you, but if it doesn’t, there’s one specific problem that can be easily diagnosed and fixed. As noted above, you must run Mac App Store Moom 3 before attempting to crossgrade and upgrade to Moom 4. If you haven’t done that, but buy an upgrade license anyway, then you get into a situation where Moom 4 sees an upgrade license, but can’t find a matching license for Moom 3.

It’s also possible that the Mac App Store receipt file Moom needs to read goes “stale” for seemingly no reason at all—we have seen this happen with other Mac App Store apps, so it’s entirely possible that you did everything you were supposed to do, but still encounter this issue.

So as a first step in solving a crossgrade problem, run the Mac App Store version of Moom 3 to ensure that the needed file is present.

After doing that, you can check if Moom is in this “missing license” state by launching Moom 4 and selecting Moom → Buy Moom… from the Moom menu bar menu to open Moom’s purchase/license window. If the window contains the text “Previous license not found,” like this…

…then there’s a good chance you can fix this problem very easily.

Leave that window open, and switch to Finder. In Finder, navigate into your user’s Library > Application Support > Many Tricks > Licenses folder. Because macOS hides your user’s Library folder by default, the easiest way to do this is to hold down the Option key, then select Go → Library from the Finder’s menu. When the Library folder opens, navigate into Application Support > Many Tricks > Licenses.

Once in that folder, you should see a Moom license file. Just drag and drop that file onto the “This license could be yours” area of the still-open license window in Moom 4. When you do, Moom will complete your crossgrade and Moom 4 upgrade, and the window will change to show you as a fully-licensed Moom 4 user:

If you don’t see that, please open a ticket for more help.


Additional troubleshooting

If you don’t have the easy-to-fix issue above, it’s impossible to say exactly what might have gone wrong without additional information. But that’s why we’re here! Just open a ticket explaining that your crossgrade failed, and we’ll figure out the problem and get everything sorted out.

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