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Not important enough: 1Password abandons its native Mac app

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

#51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

These significant upgrades to iCloud Keychain are still in beta (macOS Monterey and iOS 15). If AgileBits' announcement represents their response to a competitor that hasn't even released yet, if it means they're diminishing their own product before the competition has even arrived, then I would have zero sympathy for them.

Quite frankly that seems an absurd hypothesis. In the face of competition from Apple, the correct response by AgileBits should have been to double down on product quality and pushing feature depth.

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

#52
Basically they put some arbitrary deadlines which mean nothing but for some reason had to be enforced. They equipped most hipster tools like Rust, SwiftUI, Electron. And they failed miserably.

That’s a good lesson. Extend deadlines if necessary. Use old boring technologies. Don’t surprise users with unnecessary changes. Is it so hard.

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

#53
I wish they'd just offer the great current Mac app. It's there, it's fully functional and works great.

This really is a shame. Electron apps are slowly becoming the bane of my existence. 1Password was the only native thing I still used somehow. Android Studio and Terminal are only other non-Chrome/Electron things I use. Even with 64GB of RAM it's a pain. The rendering of everything just gets slow if you have too much open on a high res monitor. Bleh.

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

#54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What upgrades are you referring to? I’m looking to migrate from 1Password but maybe keychain will be good enough. Does it work with other browsers on the Mac?

https://www.macrumors.com/2021/06/11/macos-monterey-password...

They've released a cross-platform Chrome extension, plus a native Windows client. No Firefox as far as I'm aware, sadly.

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

#55

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 it…

SSO for unlocking the password vault?

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

#56
1Password was reading too much Internet, they thought they have their backend written in Rust would get all the attention and hit the jackpot.

Turns out the hate against Electron is far greater than the hype on Rust. And to the specific Mac User group, anything not written in Swift and SwiftUI are just junk.

To be fair, this is one of the best electron Apps out there in terms of resource usage. Most likely due to it being purely used as UI and nothing more. The old 1Password uses 50-60MB of memory, the new one uses ~120MB. I would argue the old one wasn't actually that memory efficient in the first place.

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

#57
post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Good point. VSCode isn’t bad.

VSCode is only fast by IDE standards whereas functionality-wise it’s more an extensible text editor. It lags even at the modest task of resizing its own window, where the UI just freezes at its original rectangle and waits until you release the window. No native app I use behaves like this. This is even before mentioning the innumerate pop-up s that all have different, inconsistent styling. As an application it’s absolutely alien on the system.

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

#58

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 use 1P for our business and honestly, I’m not sure how fit for purpose it is in the enterprise domain. We only have about 20 people using it and it’s a not that great from an admin perspective.

Simple things like sharing a single password between teams mean you need to create a shared vault that both teams have access to and put the pw in there. Or you send a copy, but now you have 2 copies that aren’t linked.

You can add files but they’re weirdly half linked to passwords, floating about without anyway to see which passwords they’re linked to. Sure, it’s not a file store, but you have to live with the crappy ui or use some other tooling for other metadata.

When I last checked, there was no obvious way to audit which accounts had accessed a given pw. Or to see all the passwords that an account had accessed.

Maybe people manage to make it work for them but as our company grows, I’m going to be pushing harder and harder to remove it from the organisation (and I’ve been using it since 2010).

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

#60
I'm disappointed that this article doesn't mention any specific performance problems. Sure, Electron can be slower than a native app, and less secure too. But the core functionality of 1Password's UI is pretty basic. Is there any perceptual difference in performance? Or any concerning compromise in security? If not, then this complaint is purely ideological.
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