1Password for Safari does not work with standalone vaults [iOS Password AutoFill is available]

brank

@volcom45 This change ruined my day as well yesterday. I too lost sleep over it. 1password has been a part of my computing experience for years. This app plus scrivener are what define my Mac / iOS computing experience and I feel like a part of me was lost yesterday. I used the share sheet function at least 2 dozen times per day and the auto-fill won’t cut it because I have multiple logins per some sites for work reasons.

dteare

Thanks for sharing your thoughts everyone. It’s certainly a difficult topic and I wish we didn’t need to talk about and I’m certainly sorry we pissed you off. But I’m thankful we’re still talking. 🙏🏻

To @Mark1Up’s point I’d like to start by highlighting exactly what functionality is available and what is no longer available for standalone vault users specifically.

With Password Autofill you can fill usernames & passwords for logins, including having the current TOTP value copied to your clipboard for extra convenience on sites with 2FA enabled. You can also save and create logins within 1Password.

Password Autofill is super convenient as iOS highlights it right above the keyboard for easy discovery and activation. It's important to note Mark's followup post where he points out that when the Safari extension is enabled and the Standalone Vaults Are Not Supported message appears it seems to interfere with Password Autofill for some reason. I'd like us to fix this issue if at all possible as that's super frustrating to say the least.

Now as good as Password Autofill is there were a few things that the API didn’t empower us to do, namely:

• Fill sign-in forms with more than 2 fields
• Fill credit cards
• Fill addresses from identities

For me personally Password Autofill completely replaced the need for the share sheet and I haven't used it for years now. We could have retired the share action when Password Autofill came available in iOS 12 but it wasn’t hurting anything and wasn’t in the way so we left it.

We did however stop maintaining it as it was becoming quite long in the tooth. Custom share actions were added by Apple way back in 2014 and support for the action extension was introduced in iOS 8. The first commit to our open sourced app extension repo was on July 20th, 2014. 4 years later Password Autofill was introduced in iOS 12 and it was a wonderful addition to iOS and superseded the share extension. As great as the share action was 7 years ago, it was well past time to retire it.

Now I can definitely relate to the idea that we could have postponed the share sheet’s retirement. We’ve postponed the retirement for a few years already so why not another year or two? We could have done exactly that but maintaining three different features that all serve the same purpose (Password AutoFill,custom share sheet action, and now the new Safari web extension) was a tall order. Something had to give and since the share sheet offers the least functionality that isn’t covered by the other two it was time to bid it adieu.

It would have been great to have provided more notice to users here and on desktop this would have been a lot easier as we have much more flexibility there with upgrades. On desktop we can prompt users if they’d like to upgrade and then install the new version when they’re ready. It’s really nice to have that flexibility and it helps a ton with communication as it allows us to not only highlight a change but also make sure its shown to the people who need to see it. I’d love to have this flexibility everywhere but unfortunately that’s not the world we live in.

To @occamsrazor’s point thought it would have been good to include this in the release notes. That was an oversight. I’ve asked the team to update our 1Password for iOS release notes accordingly. I am not sure if we are able to update the App Store release notes now that we’ve already been approved and published (plus they'll be old soon as we're submitting an emergency release to address an iOS 12 crasher) but have asked the team to do so if possible.

As for the blog post, that wasn’t an oversight per se as we purposely kept things simple there. I was actively involved in the creation of the announcement and I removed the mention of memberships and standalone vaults we had there. The plan was to allow the in-app popup to help those on standalone vaults find the information they needed. In retrospect I can see how that would feel like a bait-and-switch so if I had a mulligan left I’d put back the sentence I deleted during editing. In general this is something I’ve wrested with over the last 16 years now as I’ve had plenty of posts that try to itemize everything for each particular instance a user may find themselves in and it results in the important bits not being discoverable for anybody. I’ve found the Less Is More approach works better overall but I admit that approach backfired here and I should have kept the mention.

As for the upgrade coupon @agtoau, you can email us your license and receive 50% off your first 3 years. That’s for our pay-as-you-go (either monthly or yearly) approach.

Some people would prefer to only pay when they explicitly authorize it and if this sounds like you please ask for the gift card option when you write in. We set up a special deal license holders can purchase a $99 gift card worth $150 of credit (only available on 1Password.com , not .eu or .ca), allowing you to use 1Password for over 3 years. Once those 3+ years are up you can choose whether or not to pay again. No recurring or automatic payments will be taken and your data will always be available whether you renew or not.

I’d like to add one thing about the new SKU and 1Password 8 that @volcom45 brought up. I agree completely that it would have been lovely to have 1Password 8 ready for release this week and to have packaged it alongside the new Safari extension. That would have brought me incredible joy and indeed this is exactly what we wanted to do. It’s too early to lift the curtain up too far but the hard reality is we needed to make adjustments to the schedule that resulted in 1Password 8 for iOS being pushed out to next year. When 1Password 8 comes out we will be going through the incredibly difficult process of releasing a new SKU and asking users to manually install the new release. We did this back in the day for 1Password 4 and while super painful for everyone involved, we will be doing it again for the exact same reasons as we did then: we don’t want to take away your existing features. It would have helped a lot if we had a new SKU this week but it just wasn’t something we were able to do in the timeline we found ourselves with. We had 72 working days from Apple announcing web extensions on iOS at WWDC in June to launch day and we needed all of them and frankly would have been thankful for more.

This extension did everything we ever wanted to do in Safari on iOS (well, almost!) and Password Autofill handled the vast majority of features that the share action and was easier to use so we elected to retire the share action early in the development process.

I know this isn’t the decision you wanted us to make but I hope this helps explain why we made the choices we did.

Take care and stay safe. ❤️

++dave;
1Password Founder

verdi1987

@dteare, I don’t think anyone is suggesting that retirement of the Share Sheet extension be postponed “another year or two.” However, it seems the feature set is in line with 1Password 8. Desktop 1Password 8 does not support local vaults; similarly, mobile 1Password should drop local vault support for the extension with v8, not a point release with no forewarning and no disclosure in the release notes.

Why not let those of us with standalone vaults revert to v7.7.8 by publishing a legacy version for us? We understand we won’t get new features, and we’re fine with that.

max_h

You explain, but you don’t take action. The explanation won’t give me back a feature I was using multiple times on a weekly basis.

rotax

I came here because share sheets were not working for me and I too was a bit dismayed. After reading the reference above, I went to Settings / Passwords/ Autofill and 1Password was there and it was already checked.... but it was not working. I deselected it and reselected it. There was a popup and then it was re-enabled. All is working as before for me on iOS 15 with 7.8.

Question regarding "Stand Alone Vaults" I am using a vault that is synced on iCloud, and it appears to be working fine. Is this gone for some people or going away in the future? TIA

brank

There's definitely a huge delta between postposing deprecating share sheets by a few years and instead deprecating it in a point-release version without including this critical detail in the version notes.

My assumption is that this is done to push people into the subscription model, and in their internal meetings they figured only a handful of loudmouths would bother making accounts on their support forums to complain but that would be offset by the people who decide to upgrade to the subscription model. And if that's the case, be honest, I get it, I'm a business person, too.

If you really are sorry for breaking this feature in a point-release with zero notice and zero comments in the release notes, then release 7.9 with the feature back in, simply put the code back in from 7.7 and call it 7.9

Then we can disable auto-updates of apps. Or better yet, do this, and make iPassword 8.0 a totally separate iOS app. So that everyone on the legacy app can never accidentally "upgrade" (I put it in quotes because removal of features is technically a downgrade) to the neutered iPassword 8.0. OmniGroup does this and it works great.

So if this was a business decision, admit it, be honest, tell us you will never give us a 7.9 fix that brings this back, and those of us posting here and possibly the hundreds others lurking on the forums finding this later can move on, part ways, move to Bitwarden or KeePassXC or something else, and we will mourn the time we had with one of our favorite apps.

If this was an oversight, then platitudes will not appease us. You being "sorry" that you ruined our ability to use a critical app and "forgot" to mention it in the release notes doesn't fix anything, neither does a discount on a subscription. The only true fix is to add it back in as a 7.9 and let us "upgrade" back to the previous version. And this fix requires little effort, is fair and appropriate, and would prove you do care about all of your customers.

Right now, I am actively discouraging people from subscribing to 1Password. Over the last year or two since standalone licenses went away, I gave out my recommendation as a "consideration", less strong than the "must-buy" I told people years ago when it was standalone. But with this disgusting change, my opinion and advice to others is actively avoid.

Because this seems like a calculated plan to get people to move to the subscription model. That hurts legacy standalone users. And great, so you get us to leave and only have subscribers. What happens when you decide the subscription is still not enough money and create a higher tier of subscription that's more expensive. And then deprecate critical features from the lower tier subscribers, to pressure people into the higher more expensive tier?

You wouldn't do that? You're doing it now, creating two classes of customers, one that is more profitable and stripping features from one customer base to attempt to convert them to the more profitable customer base. If I asked you a few years ago when subscriptions first started, if you'd ever actively remove features that were already in 1Password from the legacy standalone licensees, you'd have said "absolutely not, if you like 1Password, you can keep it as is and continue using it".

If I cared enough to look back I'm sure I could find those exact words because the fear when the subscription model was added as an option is that it would become mandatory and you'd remove features we already were using. And it's come to pass.

Bring back the features for legacy users and regain the communities trust or cross into the dark side for short-term profits. If you can't afford to keep the lights on, then I get it. Better to destroy your reputation than have to fire people during a pandemic. But know that this "simple regrettable mistake" has long term consequences if it's not fixed with a reversion.

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Dom

We could have retired the share action when Password Autofill came available in iOS 12 but it wasn’t hurting anything and wasn’t in the way so we left it.

That sounds awfully similar to the situation we’re in now. It wasn’t hurting anything and it wasn’t in the way.

Now I can definitely relate to the idea that we could have postponed the share sheet’s retirement. We’ve postponed the retirement for a few years already so why not another year or two? We could have done exactly that but maintaining three different features that all serve the same purpose (Password AutoFill,custom share sheet action, and now the new Safari web extension) was a tall order. Something had to give and since the share sheet offers the least functionality that isn’t covered by the other two it was time to bid it adieu.

Ah, well if the maintenance burden was substantial…

We did however stop maintaining it as it was becoming quite long in the tooth. Custom share actions were added by Apple way back in 2014 and support for the action extension was introduced in iOS 8.

… oh.

Is there any compelling reason at all why the share sheet couldn’t have been retained in the current app and retired with the forthcoming, subscriber-only 1Password 8?

I can only see one, and it’s not technical.

ejr

I started on 1PW with version 01 and have bought standalone licenses ever since. With V08 changes I decided to wait and see how AB was going to handle the changes since they earned my trust for the last 10+ years of use. Based on emails and reading the forums I decided to stay on 7 and not upgrading to subscription even with all the incentives they offered.
Now they "broke" V07 iOS with the "need subscription to use vaults" for standalone users which is a convenient mistake to "advertise" that your current version will stop working sooner rather than later and you need to pay the subscription.
So it looks like I will not have a year to evaluate if I want to stay using 1PW because I cannot trust when a point release will remove more functionality.

volcom45

@Aaron Pinsker thanks for the reminder. Time to go leave my 1 star review and help further educate the community about what @dteare and Co decided to gift upon us.. I’d suggest the rest of those upset do the same. The media is starting to get ahold of this story and it’s not too late for them to make things right. I’m sure they don’t want their image completely tarnished in mud..

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einsteinbqat

Time to leave 1 star reviews on the App Store, I believe. Perhaps, it would be good to tell other people to do this on other forums/boards like MacRumors, and such. @Aaron Pinsker @volcano2

brank

Good idea, I think I can edit my original 5 star review from several years ago and make it 1 star. I did read recent reviews and someone gave it 2 starts calling it a “glitch” that the share sheet function isn’t working. I can only imagine what that person will say when they find out it’s not unintentional.

brank

@einsteinbqat good idea, I don’t have an ArsTechnica account anymore. I think I have an old MPU forum account and I don’t regularly use Reddit but it’s quick to make new accounts to post.

Perhaps without enough community uproar, we can get agile bits to change their minds and do the right thing.

DavOS

As far as I can see, the unanswered question is:

• Does the latest iOS/iPadOS App (currently 7.8.1) break Dropbox sync?

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einsteinbqat

We won’t be able to change the general direction that 1P is heading towards, but we sure can warn current and, especially, potential users to avoid the app.
@Aaron Pinsker

secuity_guru

Hi,

I found a bug. After updating to 7.8 or 7.8.1 the entry of 1Password in the iOS ShareSheet got lost. Its missing after updating the app.

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1Password Version: 7.8 with local vault
Extension Version: Not Provided
OS Version: iOS 15

blackph0en1x

I'm trying to get in touch with Apple to see if I can get a refund because they purposely removed a working feature in a .x version upgrade.
Discussion, at the moment, is on twitter here https://twitter.com/theblackph0en1x/with_replies feel free to join and let hear your voice.

I also linked this thread hoping that AgileBits will not remove it.

KnightOfNight

1password is no longer in the IOS Share button so I now have no way to fill in passwords. I can't find any news or other trouble reports about this.

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1Password Version: 7.8.1
Extension Version: n/a
OS Version: IOS 14.8

brank

I'll save the 1Password staff the trouble of answering this question for the 100th time today.

1) The owner of 1Password does not use the Share Button.
2) No one who works at 1Password uses the Share Button.
3) They removed the feature and consider it so useless, that they forgot to include it in the version notes before you upgraded the app.
4) They don't want to sell standalone licenses and anyone not on a subscription, they want to push into a subscription.

TL;DR totally intentional behavior. Upsetting dozens of people here on these forums, many more like you haven't upgraded yet and dont realize the change, or don't know where to complain.

If you're upset, go look for Bit Warden or KeePassXC or another password management competitor while we wait to see if AgileBits changes their stance. By the time your one to two week testing of another app is done, we'll know whether or not Agile Bits changes their position. Or if you love the new change, email Agile Bits a copy of your license and get 50% off the first three years of 1Password subscription.

In the mean time, feel free to leave an honest review on the App Store of how you feel about this change. It seems like 90% of all recent reviews are 1 or 2 of 5 stars. I certainly don't want to influence your review in any way, just encourage you to leave an honest review to help the community.

brank

@blackph0en1x I hadn't thought of that. I purchased 1Password on iOS and Mac several years ago. If the developer intentionally removes functionality, could there be a claim for damages to include a refund?

I received a $50 check from a Playstation 3 Linux Class Action lawsuit when Sony stripped Linux functionality from the system for people who had already purchased it.

KnightOfNight

Just to be clear, when I say the IOS Share Button, I mean the button in Safari that looks like a box with an arrow coming out of the top. That button displays a menu with various functions one of which used to be 1Password. Now 1Password is gone from that menu and there's no way to fill in credentials on web pages.

KnightOfNight

I just found another big thread on this. Just awful. And I am on the subscription service already!

KnightOfNight

Perfect example of how not to treat customers. I have been a user of 1P for many years and have been a strong advocate of it. This situation is egregious enough to cause me to rethink that. I am an experienced computer and phone user and I can probably adapt to the change but there are family members in my life who will find this very hard to accept. Not to mention that I am suddenly slammed with IT work reconfiguring devices and retraining users.

1P: bring back the functionality ASAP! Make a commitment to announcing breaking changes WELL IN ADVANCE! Find out how your users use your product BEFORE you change it! Do not assume that just because the owner doesn’t use a feature that no one does!

There is probably more but I am sure others have said it or will say it.

brank

It seems like agile bits leadership has a thing against share sheets and local vaults. Perhaps the best bet would be if a few devs left to start their own competitor that was basically 1Password 6.0 that would be different by... well... it doesn't have to be different. They could release a clone of 1Password 6.0 that works on the latest OSs and I'd gladly pay another $50 for it again.