Live data from Hacker News

Not important enough: 1Password abandons its native Mac app

sixcolors.com

21–30 of 91 posts

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

#21
Well, I guess it's hard to care about (platform-)native apps and toolkits when cross-platform apps are generally winning these days (VSCode, Figma etc.) over native Mac apps, even on macOS itself.

Plus most new apps by Apple these days are horribly bad. People say native toolkits result in better performance and features etc., but I'd take all electron apps of this world instead of Apple's absolutely garbage Music app for example. The buggiest, slowest & and least performant app I've ever seen. Worse than pretty much any cross-platform app.

But hey, at least it uses native controls?

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

#22
One of the more important features of 1Password, to me, is its cross-platform nature.

Being able to use it on an iPhone, Mac, Android device, or Windows box, is beyond valuable. It’s a huge selling point.

So I am not that concerned about them using a hybrid app.

The biggest concern that I have, is that the poster child for Electron apps is Slack; which I consider to be … non-optimal. I dread firing up my Slack client on Mac.

https://twitter.com/iamdevloper/status/1072503943790497798?s...

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

#23

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…

When Apple announced their significant upgrades to iCloud Keychain a few months ago, I immediately thought that it was unfair "Sherlocking" of 1Password. AgileBits had been out there offering a first class macOS/iOS password manager experience for a long time and it seemed rude of Apple to step on their turf so blatantly.

I still have sympathy for AgileBits, but these feelings have diminished somewhat now.

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

#24
I still don't understand what people's hate for electron is. As someone who uses Windows, Linux and on occasion a mac it generally means you get a fairly consistent experience across all platforms and often it also means the linux version doesn't actually suck or you actually get linux support in the first place. Which is always a big plus for me.

Also I feel like the performance is decent at this point. For a fully featured app the difference to other frameworks is not that large any more.

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

#25

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…

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.

No. It could, but when there's only one developer working on that app for three platforms and they prioritize Windows, you gain nothing.

Native will, of course, be a bit faster and have more features, but for that you need to have a dedicated developer that knows the specialities and can make use of them. But if you want to have a mostly up-to-date app with a small developer team, cross-platform apps will be a better experience.

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

#26

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…

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.

Really? Hoping your user has updated their OS to ger the latest version of the toolkit/SDK/etc. to be able to "deliver the most up-to-date tech" vs being completely dependent on tooling you fully control ( framework, Chromium/Electron version, etc.). I forget the name of Apple's latest UI kit, but it doesn't work on macOS versions below the latest/latest-1. How can you deliver the latest tech then?

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

#27

I still don't understand what people's hate for electron is. As someone who uses Windows, Linux and on occasion a mac it generally means you get a fairly consistent experience across all platforms and often it also means the linux version doesn't actually suck or you actually get linux support in the first place. Which is always a big plus for me. Also I feel like the performance is decent at this point. For a fully…

I'm sure it's great for someone who uses multiple platforms. But if you use only one platform, the apps will feel off.

As for performance: it's not horrible, but the memory usage is.

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

#28
post #21

Well, I guess it's hard to care about (platform-)native apps and toolkits when cross-platform apps are generally winning these days (VSCode, Figma etc.) over native Mac apps, even on macOS itself. Plus most new apps by Apple these days are horribly bad. People say native toolkits result in better performance and features etc., but I'd take all electron apps of this world instead of Apple's absolutely garbage Music ap…

A lot of the worst parts of Music.app, including the Apple Music and iTunes Store UIs are actually rendered in a web view, at least last I checked. So it’s closer to being an “Electron” app (despite not using Electron itself) than a true native app in many ways.

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

#29

One of the more important features of 1Password, to me, is its cross-platform nature. Being able to use it on an iPhone, Mac, Android device, or Windows box, is beyond valuable. It’s a huge selling point. So I am not that concerned about them using a hybrid app. The biggest concern that I have, is that the poster child for Electron apps is Slack; which I consider to be … non-optimal. I dread firing up my Slack client…

I thought VSCode has been the poster child for Electron apps for years now. No one cites Slack as a good example for an app

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

#30

I still don't understand what people's hate for electron is. As someone who uses Windows, Linux and on occasion a mac it generally means you get a fairly consistent experience across all platforms and often it also means the linux version doesn't actually suck or you actually get linux support in the first place. Which is always a big plus for me. Also I feel like the performance is decent at this point. For a fully…

Recently switched to VSCode from Jetbrains IDEs on MacBook Air M1, amazed at how much faster my editor boots up, and generally also more responsive. Haven't noticed any memory issues either, I only have 8GB RAM
Post reply on HN