Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Not important enough: 1Password abandons its native Mac app

sixcolors.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 91 posts

Re: Not important enough: 1Password abandons its native Mac app

#11

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

tomduncalf wrote: post #9
ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Native will always give the richest user experience, and deliver the most up-to-date tech. That said, most applications are really windows onto server-based algorithms, so the need for a “pure native” UX is a lot less, these days, than it used to be. The one big skunk at the hybrid picnic is that we are “dancing with a gorilla.” That means that we don’t get to change the step, or stop, until the gorilla says so. If w…

> Native will always give the richest user experience, and deliver the most up-to-date tech. Oh yeah, not arguing with that at all. But I think the commercial reality is a lot of companies will think the trade off of using a cross platform framework like Electron is worthwhile, the UX is “good enough” for most users and the development process is much more efficient. Of course, users might vote with their feet and go…

It’s not a new trend at all.

Cross-platform app frameworks have been around for decades.

One of the nice things about writing native on Apple, is plugging into the latest tech. Not always a big deal, but there are some apps that use that as their biggest selling point.

Also, if we are doing low-level stuff (like Bluetooth connectivity), the app framework can be a very stubborn gorilla.

Re: Not important enough: 1Password abandons its native Mac app

#13

Post by lycopodiopsida »

Arguably, Agilebits just focuses more on enterprise customers now. The interesting thing about enterprise users is that you don’t care that much about UX anymore. Your users have no choice and software is bought by management based on some metrics and marketing demos. We, macOS users, are just not the target audience anymore.

I would argue, that the current company is only a shell of the former Agilebits, which honestly cared about users and their needs. But such is the nature of big business, it appears.

Re: Not important enough: 1Password abandons its native Mac app

#14

Post by floatboth »

Why would anyone want a password manager to have a desktop app at all? I use Bitwarden on the desktop exclusively through the Firefox extension – nearly all the time specifically through the tiny popover window in the corner of the browser. Can't say I ever want it to have more UI.

Re: Not important enough: 1Password abandons its native Mac app

#15

Post by cpressland »

lycopodiopsida wrote: post #13

Arguably, Agilebits just focuses more on enterprise customers now. The interesting thing about enterprise users is that you don’t care that much about UX anymore. Your users have no choice and software is bought by management based on some metrics and marketing demos. We, macOS users, are just not the target audience anymore. I would argue, that the current company is only a shell of the former Agilebits, which hones…

We’ve been a 1Password for Business customer for about 3 years. But we’re looking at moving to something like BitWarden because it has true SSO support, while 1Password doesn’t.

1Password has been very clear this is a feature they’re not interested in supporting, and our users have been very clear that remembering a second password and secret key for their password manager is too difficult.

AgileBits is presenting itself as Enterprise friendly, but isn’t. It has its own vision on how the enterprise should work.

Re: Not important enough: 1Password abandons its native Mac app

#16

Post by jillesvangurp »

mbjdesign wrote: post #4

The indictment here that Agilebits was willing to go above and beyond to maintain native code on both iOS and macOS yet couldn’t justify it even after going all-in on SwiftUI for iOS is striking. It demonstrates just how hard cross-platform is and how far off Apple are with getting SwiftUI to ubiquity.

It's not cross platform if all it does is IOS and mac. Apple doesn't want cross platform on any other platforms than their own. However, many app developers have to worry about windows, Android, IOS, Mac, Web. Very few organizations are willing to have dedicated platform specific teams and want to deal with keeping multiple such teams aligned.

Apple's strategy of raising the walls around their walled garden ever higher might at some point backfire. There's a bit of a vacuum in the market currently with react native and flutter being the main incumbents for cross platform. However both have their limitations.

The holy grail here is something that works on all platforms that does not require huge efforts to tailor to any specific platform. WASM is potentially shaking up this space in the next few years with applications like Figma offering a very slick experience that is mostly not based on DOM trees or other traditional web stuff. Other factors are the weakening of the Android platform in e.g. China where several phone manufacturers are locked out of that ecosystem. Many app developers need to cover all these bases.

I kind of like what Jetbrains is doing here with their multi platform Kotlin strategy. There are a lot of pieces coming together to target cross platform UI development in the next few years. They already took Jetpack Compose and made web and desktop versions of that available recently. Really all that's missing now is an IOS version (they already do mac desktop). And since it's all Kotlin, the ecosystem overlaps with the Android one in terms of libraries and skills needed. They are also working on a WASM backend for the Kotlin compiler.

Re: Not important enough: 1Password abandons its native Mac app

#17

Post by gorbypark »

tomduncalf wrote: post #5

I’ll be interested to see how React Native on desktop progresses. The developer productivity and consistency gains of working on one codebase rather than 2 or 3 cannot be argued with, and I’m confident more and more software will be moving in this direction regardless of the opinion of (what is probably) a fairly small number of hardcore users. However, I do agree that Electron can give a sub-optimal experience compa…

React Native on Windows and macOS works decently well these days. The macOS port is lagging behind the Windows one, but only by one major version. There are still some third party modules that don’t work on the desktop ports, but the support is getting better by the day. I have one small app in production that supports Android/iOS/Windows/macOS and web, all in one code base. Definitely a game changer, especially with how magically good React Native Web works. I’m using RNWeb for web-only projects, it’s that good!

Re: Not important enough: 1Password abandons its native Mac app

#18

Post by tomduncalf »

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #11
tomduncalf wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Native will always give the richest user experience, and deliver the most up-to-date tech. Oh yeah, not arguing with that at all. But I think the commercial reality is a lot of companies will think the trade off of using a cross platform framework like Electron is worthwhile, the UX is “good enough” for most users and the development process is much more efficient. Of course, users might vote with their feet and go…

It’s not a new trend at all. Cross-platform app frameworks have been around for decades. One of the nice things about writing native on Apple, is plugging into the latest tech. Not always a big deal, but there are some apps that use that as their biggest selling point. Also, if we are doing low-level stuff (like Bluetooth connectivity), the app framework can be a very stubborn gorilla.

All great points.

One thing I’d say in regard to low-level stuff is React Native allows you to fairly easily call into native code with its native modules functionality.

I work on a iOS/Android music learning app with a C++ audio engine and React Native UI (and Unity for the interactive parts) and it works quite well, for example we call into native code for connecting to Bluetooth hardware.

But you are right, given enough developers and time, native is probably always going to deliver an end result which feels more “right” on the platform.

Re: Not important enough: 1Password abandons its native Mac app

#19

Post by aaaaaaaaaaab »

mbjdesign wrote: post #4

The indictment here that Agilebits was willing to go above and beyond to maintain native code on both iOS and macOS yet couldn’t justify it even after going all-in on SwiftUI for iOS is striking. It demonstrates just how hard cross-platform is and how far off Apple are with getting SwiftUI to ubiquity.

>going all-in on SwiftUI

That was mistake number 1.

Re: Not important enough: 1Password abandons its native Mac app

#20

Post by cpressland »

floatboth wrote: post #14

Why would anyone want a password manager to have a desktop app at all? I use Bitwarden on the desktop exclusively through the Firefox extension – nearly all the time specifically through the tiny popover window in the corner of the browser. Can't say I ever want it to have more UI .

We store a lot more than just passwords in there. Credit Card Numbers, RSA/ED25519 keys, and it even connects to our Azure Key Vaults. Having a full non-browser UX is advantageous.
Post reply on HN