Getting 1Password 7 ready for the Mac App Store

As far as general updates go, I agree with you, but these shouldn't need to be that frequent. I still have software from the XP era running on my computer.

At least on Android it's fairly easy to make a new IME and just use my background dropbox syncer, so I have a backup plan if needed.

If we make it easy to find it will cause confusion for users about which to get. When we did this in the past we had a lot of users who thought they had to have both and as such would purchase both. This led to a lot of refunds on our part and explanation for which they should get.

Turns out most users are perfectly happy and will benefit greatly from the subscription side. This site and a couple of other places being the exception to this as many of you seem to prefer licenses which means this aggravates you all, but for the average person the benefit greatly from the subscription side and it's the one they often choose when we explain the benefits of each.

So making it easier to find puts that problem back on the table and quite frankly, it's something I'd really personally rather not deal with like before. It's easy to say differently until you have hundreds of users at any given time looking for help with what to buy or you accidentally find out they purchased both while helping them with some other unrelated thing.

The Mac App Store makes sense for subscriptions though. They will always have access to the latest version so long as the subscription is active, so we don't have to deal with upgrade pricing there.

For license users though it's not as clear cut. We can either issue a new app each time but we can't advertise the new version in the old version (rules) and this will end up with a lot of users not knowing there's a new version out. Subscription users will also have to upgrade manually each time and that's not convenient for them at all given they're entitled to that new version as part of their subscription.

We're trying to make it easy, though it's going to be difficult this time because we do have to get license users to switch entirely to our direct download version.

Once this is done though, subscription users can use either or, whichever they want.

License users will always use our direct download version.

When an upgrade comes out our subscription users will always be upgraded to the latest version without issues. Our license users will be prompted to upgrade or be informed of the upgrade in some way.

This is how it should work, unfortunately it was not possible to do this for the Mac App Store so we had to make changes there. Perhaps things change with the Mac App Store in the future and we can bring back both, but for now, this new method we're using provides the best user experience for both sides, once the switch is made.

I'll be the first to admit I hate removing choice from the equation here, and I hate that we have to get users to do work in the first place. But sometimes there are things outside of your ability to control and this is one of them for us.

Hope that gives some additional insight that wasn't present in the blog post though.

Kyle

AgileBits

Well... 1Password arguably doesn't sync (until the cloud stuff). It stores files on disk, dropbox syncs it behind the scenes. Given my backup size vs how often I change it: I honestly wouldn't care if it were one blob that were uploaded / downloaded at once for every change, rather than all the small pieces it does now (I assume this is to speed up sync (by a ton)? It's also a major source of sync conflicts that lose data, since dropbox will store both copies on conflict (minus bugs), so it's a horse apiece).

So it works pretty well, apparently. See also KeePass* and many other local-only password managers which people sync via scripts / dropbox / etc. They're doing fine, though 1P is dramatically better than the competition and I'm plenty happy paying for it.

I don't use any third-party services. I use what 1Pw calls "Folder" sync, as it's the only non-cloud method available. 1Pw on Mac #1 saves a binary file to disk, and 1Pw on Mac #2 loads that file from disk. There's no components here out of 1Pw's control. Sometimes, 1Pw simply doesn't write the file on Mac #1, as I can tell by the modification timestamp.

I ran 1PasswordTroubleshooting.app, and sent in the 400KB report it generated. The response I got from tech support mentioned nothing about what might have been found in that file (or what they expected to find, which could prevent data from getting from the application to the filesystem). They simply gave the usual spiel about restarting/upgrading.