1Password Teams features not available to non-Lollipop versions

drwho

After switching to the Google Play beta version, I could not find any options for Team vaults. Turns out that the feature is not available for versions prior to 5.0. That's frustrating because I'm stuck on 4.4.2 on my Note 3, unless I want to subject myself to the numerous reported problems that 5.0 will bring and no hope of ever getting 5.1.x updates.

It would be helpful to understand the reasoning behind the decision to not support KitKat (4.4.x) for the Teams feature.

Thanks,
Arif

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1Password Version: 6.0b2
Extension Version: Not Provided
OS Version: Android 4.4.2
Sync Type: Wifi

peri

Hi @drwho. I've asked a developer to jump in here to answer your question, since I think they'd be able to give a more detailed response than I can at the moment. :)

dteare

I'm sorry for the trouble, @drwho, we'd love to be able to support more devices with teams. We have a lot of customers that have not updated their devices past Android 4 yet and it would be awesome if we could support these as well.

We try to support the older versions of Android as much as possible. In fact, we have 3 separate requirements, depending on what you need:

1. 1Password 6 requires Android 4.1 for most features. Thankfully the libraries we depend upon for Material Design and most other features were made available to us in Jelly Bean.
2. 1Password for Teams requires Android 5 as it depends upon improvements made to the encryption library that were first shipped in Lollipop.
3. Fingerprint Unlock requires Android 6.0 as the fingerprint authentication API is currently only available in Marshmallow. We expect that this will be widely adopted across new and existing Android devices as Marshmallow support continues to grow and we may eventually see support back ported to older OS versions too.

You can see that this is pretty complicated in general, so I'd be super happy if we could support all features all the way back to Android 4.1. We don't have a lot of control over devices supporting the Marshmallow fingerprint API, but in theory we have some flexibility with Teams support. So let's dive into exactly why can't we support the teams features in Android 4.1.

The main issue with prior versions of Android stem from the fact that teams is using a different encryption format. You can see the 1Password for Teams White Paper for all the nitty gritty details, but suffice it to say we designed the new format to be even more secure-er than the previous one. 1Password for Teams faces a new set of threats and we therefore needed to design things slightly differently to build additional defences against these threats.

The new design depends upon some important goodies that Google built into 5.0. Google expanded the set of cryptography algorithms available within Android 5.0 and the performance of these algorithms in 5.0 is much faster. In theory we can use a third-party encryption library (for example, SpongyCastle looks promising), but it will require more time.

The thing is, time is our most precious resource. 1Password 6 for Android was a huge release and it already took us much longer than we anticipated, so we're certainly not going to delay 6.0 any further. We also already have a full schedule for the subsequent 6.1 release, and after pushing the team for faster, more frequent releases, I am hesitant to add anything more to that release either.

Once the dust settles over the next few months, we'll re-evaluate our priorities and see what we can do. With that said, please keep in mind that Android 4.4.2 will be 3 years old soon. In terms of phones, 3 years is not a long time (indeed I just updated my old iPhone 5 to the latest iOS and it works great), but in terms of software, 3 years is an incredibly long time. Quite frankly, I hope you upgrade to Android 5 first so we don't have to worry about this, but I understand that's sometimes easier said than done :)

drwho

Thank you for taking the time to provide a well reasoned explanation. Clearly these are legitimate constraints based on core functional requirements. I can accept that.

Thank you.
Arif

peri

I'm so glad Dave was able to answer your question! Let us know if you need anything else!

dteare

Thank you for your understanding, @drwho. I appreciate it a lot.

While re-reading your original post I realized that we could do a much better job of explaining that Android 5 is needed for Teams. Perhaps the Teams panel should always be available in Settings and explain why the feature cannot be used on older OSes. I've asked the team to add that, or alternatively, to revisit SpongyCastle and see if they can support Android 4 :)

Take care.

drwho

That makes more sense. It is less intuitive for an advertised feature to be missing as opposed to disabled/inactive. Especially, one as prominent as Teams.

My vote would be to have it inactive than missing.

saad

I completely agree. We will get this change into the 6.1 beta. :)

ntimo

@saad what change do you mean?

dteare

Saad simply means that the Teams page will appear in Settings, even on older Android devices. We'll have some text saying to the effect that 1Password Teams requires Android 5 or later.