7.8.3 for iOS disables AirDrop for sharing an item

billj

Just upgraded to 1Password for iOS version 7.8.3. Now, when I tap on the Share "button" in an item, a "Get a Link to Share" sheet appears. (Screen shot attached.) I no longer have the ability to send an item via AirDrop, Messages, email, etc. Observed this behavior on three iOS devices. This behavior did not occur in iOS 7.8.2.

Nothing about this in the iOS 7.8.3 release notes.

Googling "1Password Get a Link to Share" comes up with nothing helpful.

If "Get a Link to Share" is now the only way to share, what happens if the person wanting to share has an INDIVIDUAL account, not a Family account or an account supporting Teams? Can Individual accounts could share items with other 1Password users?

And if it's shared to a particular email address, how is the "recipient" notified? (I asked a client with an Individual plan to share an item to the email address tied to my 1Password Family account. Nothing arrived in email. Nothing showed up in my account on 1Password.com. Nothing appears in my 1Password Mac app.)

And what about the message the sender sees after pressing the Get a Link to Share button: "They'll need to verify their email before they can access the item." Where? How?

Sending a 1Password item via AirDrop was simple and useful. "Get a Link to Share" is a complicated, opaque mess.

Not happy about this.

---

1Password Version: 7.8.3
Extension Version: Not Provided
OS Version: iOS 15.0.1

chrisdj

Hi @billj!

You've discovered something cool that's coming soon! We will be announcing more information about it in the coming week — I'll be sure to come back to this thread and update it once we have that extra info!

Happily, you can still use AirDrop to share items. Tap Get Link to Share and then on the following screen you will see buttons to copy or share. Tapping the share button will bring up any destination the system has available, including AirDrop.

billj

Thanks @chrisdj

Tried what you suggested. At least under iOS, what gets AirDropped is a link that opens a “facsimile” of the item in mobile Safari. But is there a way to import the item into the recipient’s 1Password—not just view it in a browser window?

I assure you I have good reason want to transfer an item from one 1Password user to another. Like I was able to do until 7.8.3 dropped yesterday.

Also, isn’t it a little odd to ship a substantial change to 1Password without telling your customers about it?

chrisdj

You're welcome, @billj!

Presently, the recipient could copy and paste the shared item contents into a new item in their 1Password account. This new sharing method allows you control over who can access the item and for how long. I'll pass along your vote for the ability to allow a recipient to easily import the item to their own account.

As I mentioned before, you've discovered this a little early, and we will have an announcement about this change in the coming week.

Customer1passCanada

This removal of Airdrop from 1password threw me off (October 5, 2021)

Let me get this right. There is no way to transfer items between my family at home unless it goes through 1password servers first? It seems to me somebody just injected themselves as middle man.

Regressions (removal of a perfectly working feature) is not something I consider as a feature, but it's opposite -- I've been sharing items between family within 1password with AirDrop for years.

The person in the team that made this decision better have a good reason -- a very good reason for removal of AirDrop as sharing item. It increases ecosystem lockdown, I get it. But how does it benefit the customer?

Considering cancelling 1password family subscription over this alone.

brank

@billj Sorry to hear about your loss of this critical function to your family. I suffered a similar loss two weeks ago with the unannounced removal of share sheets in iOS. To which the founder of 1password explained that no one at 1Password used share sheets so they didn't see an issue removing it without mentioning it in the patch notes and giving people an opportunity to avoid updating their app.

One can only assume that no employee at 1Password ever used airdrop features either, so no big deal to silently remove it.

@Customer1passCanada This is the new strategy of 1Password. ALL data must go to their centralized servers. There is no longer an option for any kind of non-server-centric functionality, to include the removal of local vaults.

The benefit of this shift is to turn password management into software as a service (SaaS) which then requires customers keep paying monthly fees to access their data. If 1Password continued to allow people to use offline vaults, or in your case, local file transfers that didn't involve their servers, then you wouldn't need them anymore and they'd lose revenue.

Also something about they claim it's safer to have all of your data on their cloud rather than your device. So I assume their position is that it's more secure if your data goes over the internet onto their server than if it moved a few feet directly from your device to your son's device. I am only a CISSP, and my level of info sec training tells me the opposite, but I also don't run a fantastically successful company like AgileBits so perhaps their security engineers are better trained and know better than I.

Unknown

This content has been removed.

Unknown

This content has been removed.

Unknown

This content has been removed.

chrisdj

@billj and @Customer1passCanada

As promised, our official announcement of this feature for 1Password members is now out. You can learn more about Psst! (Password Secure Sharing Tool) on our blog and our support docs.

I would like to clarify a few things.

First, this new version of sharing is much more secure than the previous share links. Psst! allows you to have control over how long a secret is sharable — from a single view up to 30 days — and who is able to access it. That can be anyone with the link, or a limited audience who will need to authenticate to see the secret. Also, when you share an item, you are sharing a copy of the item, not the item itself, so there is no worry of someone else having direct access to an item in your vault.

Second, Psst! is mainly for sharing with people outside of your 1Password account. If you use 1Password Families or Teams, the better way to share to your family or teams is through a Shared vault. @Customer1passCanada, I would recommend a Shared vault within your family account.

Lastly, because Psst! requires a 1Password membership (Individual, Family, Teams subscription), customers on a standalone purchase of 1Password (syncing via iCloud, Dropbox, WLAN server, or not syncing at all) retain the previous share method. Of course, as I mentioned, there are some broader security implications with that method such as not being able to set an expiration on the shared item, so be aware before you share.

Unknown

This content has been removed.

billj

First of all, I still think it's a poor practice to make a major change to a critical application and let a week go by without announcing it. Yes, @chrisdj revealed the change in his post above, but only after I encountered it and started this thread.

Second, without going into detail in a public forum, I had a very good reason to transfer via AirDrop. I am an IT professional, and sometimes needed to use the feature in the course of my work. Now it's gone. And the so-called "replacement" does not do what I need it to do.

Third, if one simply wants to transfer an item between a subscriber and a standalone user, it can no longer be done easily. Instead, now one has to use Psst, then create a new item, then copy and paste the notes. And re-create fields, one by one. What a waste of time.

Finally--and I am mentioning this here because it's related to removing AirDrop transfer--with version 7.8, EXPORTING HAS BEEN REMOVED FROM 1PASSWORD MAC. Not only is AirDrop gone; I can no longer generate a 1PIF file, put it on a USB stick, walk it to another Mac, import it, and let it sync to iOS devices.

But it's worse. A 1Password user now has zero ways to back up their data. Their data. If, God forbid, 1Password's servers go down... POOF.

I'm sure 1Password works hard to secure and back up its servers. But to a user? Single point of failure.

I've been a 1Password customer since January 2008, and have directed many, many clients to buy 1Password for themselves.

billj

Correction to my last post: Exporting removed from 1Password Mac version 7.9, not 7.8.

Ben

Hi folks,

The "be aware before you share" AirDrop feature for standalone vaults has not changed. I recorded a video demonstrating the feature using the latest version of 1Password for iOS which can be seen here:

https://bucket.agilebits.com/ben/AirDropStandalone.mp4

Exporting removed from 1Password Mac version 7.9, not 7.8.

@billj

Exporting has not been removed from 1Password 7. Here it is in v7.9:

Note that if you're in the "All Vaults" view it has never been possible to export from this view. You have to switch to the vault you wish to export from first. Is this perhaps what you're seeing?

But it's worse. A 1Password user now has zero ways to back up their data. Their data. If, God forbid, 1Password's servers go down... POOF.

1Password works from a database on your computer, which then syncs when you are online. Using 1Password does not require our servers to be online, or even that you have an active internet connection. You can confirm this by disconnecting from WiFi and pulling any connected ethernet cables. As exports are unencrypted I would not recommend using them for backups.

Third, if one simply wants to transfer an item between a subscriber and a standalone user, it can no longer be done easily. Instead, now one has to use Psst, then create a new item, then copy and paste the notes. And re-create fields, one by one. What a waste of time.

The Psst! item sharing service is brand new and we will be iterating on it over time. That said, standalone vaults will not be part of 1Password moving forward and as such new features such as Psst! are not likely to be designed with standalone vaults in mind. For those with 1Password accounts, we're working toward an "Save to 1Password" button on the item details page in Psst!, and this will allow account holders to add the item to any of their vaults in any of their signed-in accounts. Hopefully that is something we can deliver on soon. Membership is the way forward with 1Password.

I hope that helps address the concerns raised here. Thank you for taking the time to express them.

Ben

billj

Thank you, @Ben

My bad: I didn't realize that it's not possible to export from All Vaults. What's worse, that's even stated in the "how to export data from 1Password" help entry. Usually, I export from an individual vault. But last night, after updating to 7.9, I tried exporting from All Vaults. And concluded that Export was removed from 7.9. I needed to follow my own sage advice: Is it correlation or causality?

I very much appreciate that PIF1 files are not secure. What would you say if they were "enclosed" in password-protected .zip archives? Isn't that how 1Password standalone backups are secured?

A "Save to 1Password" button on the Psst! page sounds like an excellent solution. And I agree--no need to build this with standalone vaults in mind.

Regarding membership: one of the first things I noticed is how much faster and reliable 1Password.com syncing is, compared to syncing with iCloud. And shared vaults in the Family plan are wonderful.

Ben

Glad to hear we were able to clear up the confusion on the export situation. :) We're really not trying to lock anyone in. Being able to take your data with you if you want to go has always been important to us. It isn't always an easy problem to solve, and so we've had varying success as things have continued to evolve and the underlying data becomes more complex. We continue to put efforts behind this though and do truly want folks to feel like they own their data. In some ways we're also at the mercy of 3rd parties to support importing our exports. We try to make this as easy to do as possible by building sane export formats, but it is still up to them to do so.

I very much appreciate that PIF1 files are not secure. What would you say if they were "enclosed" in password-protected .zip archives? Isn't that how 1Password standalone backups are secured?

I'm not as familiar with the protections offered by password-protected zip archives as I might like to be, so I hesitate to comment on that specifically. I will say though that that isn't the protection we rely on for standalone vault backups. Those are zipped, but we do not use zip password protection at all. Instead it is the encrypted 1Password database that is inside the zip, so you need the Master Password to decrypt it. The act of unzipping the zip does not require a password.

A "Save to 1Password" button on the Psst! page sounds like an excellent solution. And I agree--no need to build this with standalone vaults in mind.

I'm very hopeful that'll be something we can offer sooner than later. :+1:

Regarding membership: one of the first things I noticed is how much faster and reliable 1Password.com syncing is, compared to syncing with iCloud. And shared vaults in the Family plan are wonderful.

❤️ So glad to hear it.

Ben