Not important enough: 1Password abandons its native Mac app • Hacker News Board

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

#41

Post by Kaibeezy » Sat, Aug 14, 2021, 9:42 AM UTC

simondotau wrote: post #23

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…

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.

If their Mac app has been sherlocked to death, why wouldn’t this make you feel more sympathy?

Do you think Apple knew AgileBits was dropping their Mac version and stepped into the opening? Or did AgileBits step back once it became pointless to compete with an upcoming OS feature?

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

#42

Post by simonh » Sat, Aug 14, 2021, 9:44 AM UTC

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, macOS users, are just not the target audience anymore.

I'm not entirely sure this is indicative of that, I mean what were they supposed to do? SwiftUI is clearly the right choice for iOS, but if they use it on Mac they would have to develop a separate implementation for older Macs, and anyway they hit problems where SwiftUI just flat out isn't mature enough on Mac anyway.

The only other alternative would have been to rewrite the native client again in ObjC, knowing that they would have to rewrite it again in the near future anyway. All of these options suck really badly. I think it's just unfortunate timing given the current state of development of SwiftUI. do you really see a better pragmatic way forward?

This way hopefully in future when older Macs cease being an issue, and SwiftUI on Mac matures, hopefully they will port the iOS code base to Mac. At least the fact they went with SwitfUI on iOS instead of a cross platform framework is a good sign.

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

#43

Post by microtonal » Sat, Aug 14, 2021, 9:46 AM UTC

Sebb767 wrote: post #25

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. 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…

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.

This is why a lot of people are upset. AgileBit was that dedicated developer that developed top-tier macOS apps (like OmniGroup). Many people have poured hundreds of dollars into their product because it was such a great Mac app.

And now that people are locked into cloud storage and a subscription [1] and AgileBits suddenly morphs from an independent Mac developer into a VC-funded Electron developer, a lot of people feel betrayed. Of course, perhaps people shouldn't be surprised, AgileBits is a business after all. But the AgileBits founders always projected this image of being a community and of them cherishing their users.

Who knows, maybe they still care and genuinely think this is the best choice for their Mac users, in which case there is a serious disconnect. Or perhaps, they are not that nice, warm company anymore and this is just a cold business choice.

[1] Which adds to the irony, because one of the main arguments for subscriptions is always that it brings in continuous funding for development, allowing continuous roll-out of new features to users.

Turns out that before subscriptions, Mac users would just not buy the new Electron version and it would hurt AgileBits. With subscriptions, Mac users can hate the Electron version and they will pay for it anyway.

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

#44

Post by chrisdbanks » Sat, Aug 14, 2021, 9:48 AM UTC

I think using native UI components is the least of 1password's UX problems. I'm a long term user of 1password on Windows and Android and I find the user interface to be incredibly unintuitive. Things that should be simple such as moving passwords and creating new vaults seem needlessly complex to do. The new vault button is in a different place to everything else and at the bottom of the list of vaults. For me, it's one of my least favourite apps to use.

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

#45

Post by brutopia » Sat, Aug 14, 2021, 9:53 AM UTC

simonh wrote: post #42

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, macOS users, are just not the target audience anymore. I'm not entirely sure this is indicative of that, I mean what were they supposed to do? SwiftUI is clearly the right choice for iOS, but if they use it on Mac they would have to develop a separate implementation for older Macs, and anyway they hit problems where SwiftUI just flat out isn't mature enough on Mac anyway. The only other alternative would have be…

Swift code runs on older macs so no need to go objc

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

#46

Post by dnh44 » Sat, Aug 14, 2021, 9:53 AM UTC

Barrin92 wrote: post #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…

I’ve got two macs, one from 2016 with 8gb of ram. Running a single electron app on that computer results in the rest of the system becoming totally unresponsive making any sort of multitasking impossible.

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

#47

Post by Kaibeezy » Sat, Aug 14, 2021, 9:54 AM UTC

numair wrote: post #39

This is an incredibly dumb move that ensures I'll be uninstalling 1Password and moving my business elsewhere. 1Password is one of the only "resident" apps that I've allowed to run persistently on my machine, specifically because it's written in native code. If I wanted something using a non-optimized web container, I wouldn't bother paying the native app premium for 1Password. And no, this isn't because it's "too dif…

As a strategic decisionmaker at a successful tiny company that has never taken outside money, I’m acutely aware of how “annoying” it is when my meticulously crafted, honed and balanced system loses customers to creepy VC crap. Fortunately, we have a base of users who understand the value, but it ain’t a mass-market thing, TFFS.

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

#48

Post by vmladenov » Sat, Aug 14, 2021, 9:56 AM UTC

simonh wrote: post #42

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, macOS users, are just not the target audience anymore. I'm not entirely sure this is indicative of that, I mean what were they supposed to do? SwiftUI is clearly the right choice for iOS, but if they use it on Mac they would have to develop a separate implementation for older Macs, and anyway they hit problems where SwiftUI just flat out isn't mature enough on Mac anyway. The only other alternative would have be…

> The only other alternative would have been to rewrite the native client again in ObjC

They had a macOS native client that was running beautifully and was a reference example of high-quality Mac software. I can understand wanting to improve the backend but the rewriting of the UI was an entirely unforced error.

And it’s made extra clear that they’ll expend effort for a native app on a platform their business is worried about losing, so this really does feel like quite the slight. I’m certainly done with them when v7 stops working.

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

#49

Post by merricksb » Sat, Aug 14, 2021, 9:56 AM UTC

Original/related stories discussed several times in recent days:

1Password for Mac Moving to Electron – https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28143563 (174 points/193 comments)

1Password 8 will be subscription only and won’t support local vaults – https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28145247 (569 points/661 comments)

1password is considering a self-hosted option to store vaults – https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28104134 (296 points/223 comments)

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

#50

Post by ErneX » Sat, Aug 14, 2021, 10:02 AM UTC

I made the jump to self hosted Bitwarden and not missing 1P. But what really made me switch was Dropbox (I had my vault there and they limited the amount of linked devices to 3 on the free accounts).