Downgrade from Acrobat to Acrobat Reader

[peteyx]

Hello, community. 

I use three PCs on a daily basis: a personal laptop, a personal desktop, and a work laptop. I use Adobe CC on my personal laptop and desktop, and my work laptop is primarily for email—which includes viewing PDFs using Acrobat Reader. 

When I first set up my work laptop, Adobe Reader prompted me to log into my Adobe account, which I did absentmindedly. It then detected my subscription and offered to upgrade my copy of Acrobat Reader to a full version of Acrobat. I knew I was only allowed to install CC on two computers, but I went ahead with this, hoping perhaps I could move just my Acrobat license to my work PC and keep using the other CC apps on my personal PCs. And if not, surely the upgrade was reversible, right?

Turns out, no, I can only use Acrobat on my work PC if I log out of all Adobe apps on one of my other PCs. Fair enough. I was able to log out of my Adobe account and create a new account with no subscription—but the app itself is still running as the full version of Acrobat. It won't let me even view a PDF unless I log back in with an active paid subscription.

I just want to go back to using Acrobat on my personal computers and Acrobat Reader on my work computer, but I can't find any way of achieving that. 

I've tried uninstalling Acrobat and running the AcroCleaner tool, then reinstalling. The app initially opens as Acrobat Reader, but then it quietly upgrades itself to Acrobat.

What else can I do?

[peteyx]

Tl;dr version: I upgraded from Acrobat Reader to Acrobat and now I can't get back to Reader even after uninstalling and reinstalling.

[Abambo]

I knew I was only allowed to install CC on two computers,

By @peteyx

You can install Creative Cloud on as many computers you want. You can activate only two computers concurrently. And you are allowed to use the programs only on one computer concurrently. You are inline with the licensing terms. Activation on a third computer is dynamic, I constantly do that, when I travel and need my laptop.

[peteyx]

Thanks! I'll do that if I can't solve the problem in the way I imagined, but in a perfect world I'd rather just downgrade my work laptop to Reader.

I switch between these three computers multiple times in a day, and I'd rather not switch activations every time I jump between authoring content on one and viewing a PDF on the other. It's very rare that I'll need any of the the full-fledged Acrobat's exclusive features.

Do you think switching from Acrobat to Reader is intentionally unsupported by Adobe?

[miguel_8021]

I was trying to achieve the same results. Did you ever figure out a way to downgrade to Reader only? Looks like removing Acrobat Pro and installing Adobe Reader is the only way, granted one must not log in to Reader with the same account, or else it will upgrade to Acrobat Pro. 

[Tariq Ahmad]

Hello, 

Acrobat offers a unified installer. The catch is that if you uninstall Acrobat from the machine and install Reader on the machine, you must ensure you don't log in to the Reader app using the Adobe ID that has a subscription linked to it. 

You can download Acrobat from here on another machine and log in with your Adobe ID: https://adobe.ly/44CQkSt

Let us know if you have any questions. 

Best regards,
Tariq | Adobe Community Team

[scott_1292]

@Tariq Ahmad - I am an admin for a state agency that manages close to 3,700 federated Acrobat licensed users.  We need to 'downgrade' about 1/3 or more of these users to remove the "Pro" features from their app.  We've tried a test group of about 100 users, deleting their licenses from the admin portal and using Intune to uninstall the ACrobat app from their computer then installing Acrobat Reader DC from our company portal.  This worked for some, but a lot of these test users could not open their Reader app, and even when they were licensed again and tried tio sign into the Reader DC app to "upgrade" again, the app did nothing but sign them into the account.  To put the correct app on there for the user to opt into "upgrading" their app to Pro, we have had to get COmputer Techs to manually remove all Acrobat and related apps, and reinstall them again.  We don't know for sure if we can just download the ETLA installer directly and install it, and make that work?

[Tariq Ahmad · Accepted solution]

Thanks for reaching out, @scott_1292.

It is really hard to tell why users were not able to launch the app on their machines. It could be an issue with the EULA, packaging, or user restriction. 

Two things I can suggest: 

- Verify the deployment using Adobe ETK toolkit: https://adobe.ly/4omCQmN

- Secondly, ask your admin to open a ticket with a dedicated enterprise/business team at Adobe. 

Let us know if you have further questions.

Best regards,
Tariq | Adobe Community Team