In defence of 1Password v8 for Mac
Disclaimer 1: I have worked for 1Password in the Apple team
Disclaimer 2: I am obviously biased
Moderators: if you’re unhappy with me posting here, I’m happy for you to delete my post
I hope I can be a little more candid than 1Password employees, but want to stress that I do not speak for 1Password. But I do want to address some of the negative comments, as I see them.
1Password clearly don’t care about the Mac
From my experience, this couldn’t be more wrong. The people in the Apple dev team live and breathe Apple, and the Mac. They have a very high proportion of of Mac-first engineers, who have decades of Mac/AppKit experience. This isn’t amateur-hour.
Just do it in SwiftUI
I love what Apple have done with SwiftUI. I really do. But while it’s great for small apps (I have one 100% SwiftUI app in the iOS AppStore), it’s a very different story for large complex apps. And 1Password is a large app. There’s an old joke that “writing the first 90% of an app takes 90% of the time, and the last 10% also takes 90% of the time”, and this couldn’t be more true of SwiftUI.
The headline feature of SwiftUI how it enables developers to quickly make native apps which run UIKit (iOS) and AppKit (macOS) under the hood - but whenever you have an abstraction layer over something complex (AppKit), you inevitably lose something. This probably has a fancy name, but I call it “the law of lossy abstractions”. You spend a large amount of time getting the fine detail just right.
Also, in my opinion, SwiftUI on the Mac isn’t quite up to the same standard as SwiftUI for iOS or watchOS.
People would accept a sub-standard SwiftUI app
I respectfully disagree. Even for a so-called “power-user” app like 1Password, I doubt the majority of people care about the underlying technologies, as long as it works well. A poor SwiftUI app would receive just as much forum-rage.
Delay the release
A former boss once told me “Sometimes you’ve just got to make a decision. Often the worst thing you can do is not make a decision”.
The move to subscriptions / standalone vaults / 1Password.com
Dave and Roustem have explained this far better than I could, and I’m not a manager or business leader - but I simply don’t see how a business can sustainably support thousands of customers if they all bought a one-off license 10 years ago. It’s not just the engineering that makes 1Password great, it’s the incredible support team too, and that support doesn’t come for free.
Yes, there are alternatives to 1Password and, while I think it’s wrong to discuss specific competitors in this 1Password forum, I wish them well. They’re trying to solve a problem which, from experience, I know is hard. They might offer free versions, or be completely open-source, but that’s comes with trade-offs. For me, having the support team there is worth every penny. The family features of 1Password are invaluable to me, which wouldn’t be possible elsewhere.
The engineering team has been bold and brave, in the past few years, with two massive engineering efforts: their investment in 1Password.com server, combined with Rust client apps is huge, and puts the product in a great position for the next decade.
So it’s a congratulations from me, and I can’t wait to see what comes next.
1Password Version: Not Provided
Extension Version: Not Provided
OS Version: Not Provided
Comments
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The people in the Apple dev team live and breathe Apple, and the Mac. They have a very high proportion of of Mac-first engineers, who have decades of Mac/AppKit experience. This isn’t amateur-hour.
But somehow they still "failed"? :cry:
https://twitter.com/roustem/status/1425527783246155776(somehow the link is rejected by the forum software?)
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As being just a user, I don't care for developer-centric views of an app. Call me ignorant, but consider the outside view, because it's what the customer sees.
I also don't care about Apple-specific things, because I'm a Windows and Android user. I want a functional Windows app. Actually, I chose 1Password before I realized it is a Apple-centric product and the Apple-specific versions of 1Password have quite some more features the Windows and Android versions provide. If I knew that, I wouldn't have taken 1Password. I rather choose a password manager designed for Windows in the first place.
However, I have a 1 year subscription, so I will stick at least 1 year to not throw that money out of the window.Now, with version 8, 1Password seems to develop a single unified app for every platform. I hope, same feature set for everything. I support that very much. Such development usually means to drop platform-specific development tools specific for one platform only. I know Apple has a specific view on everything and strong direction to vendor lock in, so I encourage every developer to free himself from these restrictions. As far as I learnt, Apple started to bring in some password managing OS tools, which may replace password managers such as 1Password some time in the future. As we know Apple, at that time Apple might just disable all external password managers and just allow their own. Considering this, I assume it's a wise decision by 1Password to better support non-Apple platforms, because it might be their business basis on Apple might vanish some time in the future.
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Thanks for the support, @matthewf! We can't wait for what's next either. :)
@Tertius3 hello! We are indeed committing to deliver the same great experience on Windows and Linux that we've offered on Mac for years. We know it's been a struggle for Windows users because our app there was always trying to catch up to the Mac version, and we're excited that will be a thing of the past.
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I know Apple has a specific view on everything and strong direction to vendor lock in, so I encourage every developer to free himself from these restrictions.
This mentality leads to degradation of software quality across all platforms. A properly written native app using that OS’s first-party tools is always superior to a “write once, run everywhere” approach. Was the Windows version inferior to the Mac version? Yes. I have and use it on the rare occasion I’m forced to use Windows. But the solution chosen didn’t just improve the Windows version—it also diminished the Mac version.
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