Unable to manage apps in Creative Cloud – “IT administrator permission required” on personal account

Creative Cloud says “No access to manage apps – IT administrator permission required” on a personal account (macOS Tahoe)

Hi everyone,

I’m running into a very frustrating issue with Adobe Creative Cloud and I’m hoping someone here has seen this before.

I’m getting the following message in Creative Cloud:

“You do not have access to manage apps. You might need to request permission from your IT administrator to get access to manage apps.”

The problem is — this is not a business, teams, or enterprise account.

Account details

• Account type: Personal Adobe ID

• Plan: Creative Cloud Photography Plan

• Subscription: active and paid

• The same account works perfectly on another Mac (Photoshop is installed and runs fine there)

What’s happening

• On my second Mac, the Apps tab is disabled

• I can’t install Photoshop or any other Creative Cloud apps

• Creative Cloud behaves as if the account is managed by an IT admin, which is not the case

What I already tried

I went through pretty much every solution suggested online:

• Signed out and back in to Creative Cloud

• Fully signed out of Creative Cloud on the other Mac

• Ended all active sessions so this is the only logged-in device

• Completely uninstalled Creative Cloud

• Used the Adobe Creative Cloud Cleaner Tool

• Reinstalled Creative Cloud from scratch

• Manually deleted Adobe folders:

~/Library/Application Support/Adobe/OOBE
/Library/Application Support/Adobe/OOBE

• Restarted multiple times

• Checked macOS privacy permissions (Full Disk Access, etc.)

Config file confusion

Many guides mention fixing this by editing or deleting a config file (like config.xml) inside the OOBE folder.

On my system:

• There is no config file

• There is no config folder at all

• The files mentioned in those tutorials simply don’t exist

System info

• Mac: Apple Silicon (M1)

• OS: macOS Tahoe 26.2

Summary

• This is a personal account, not managed by IT

• License is valid and confirmed

• Account is logged in on only one computer

• All standard fixes don’t work

• Issue happens only on this Mac (macOS Tahoe 26.2)

If anyone has found a workaround for this or knows whether this is a macOS Tahoe compatibility issue, I’d really appreciate any insights.

Thanks in advance!