1Password 8 Mac Electron App Experiment

Hi jdwusami,

1Password 8 for Mac is still in development, but it will be, as planned, a hybrid app: the back-end core, where most of the computational work goes on, is written in Rust, and the front-end is Typescript and React bundled with Electron.

This design has been chosen for a number of reasons - including security, performance, and user experience consistency - that have been discussed in a number of blog posts, as well as here in the forums.

In short, if you feel that Electron is an absolute deal-breaker, and that you cannot under any circumstances make use of an app that includes it, then you can certainly stay on 1Password 7, although as an older SKU this will not receive the same kind of feature updates that 1Password 8 will.

It's clear that you're passionate about 1Password, and we appreciate that. With that said, we feel that 1Password 8 is a very strong offering, and improves on its predecessor in a number of key ways. We are also dedicated to making it more robust, featureful, and performant on an ongoing basis too - so the Stable release of 1Password 8 for Mac, when it comes, won't be the end of the story - just as 1Password 7.9.828 is a substantially better product than earlier versions of 1Password 7.

this version 8 is a mess. (Granted, it's better than most electron apps, but that is not a high bar)

If you'd like to share any aspects of the app that you think aren't up to par, I'm happy to listen, and to pass the feedback on to our development team as well.

I read the blog post, but it’s still a massive mistake to a great native Mac app. It would be best if you listened to your customers on this as everyone is pushing back against this mistake for a reason.

Granted, I agree with this author that the blog post is an indictment of SwiftUI. "Apple shares the blame, though. If today’s SwiftUI was truly the One True Tool to unify Apple’s platforms that it’s meant to be in the future, the Mac version of 1Password would be presented in SwiftUI. And perhaps in a year or two, that will happen—after all, the SwiftUI version of 1Password is right over there on iOS, ready to make the move when it’s feasible."

When feedback to an announcement is as follows, the developer needs to reconsider the misstep. I still hope for a SwiftUI Mac app as I won't migrate to yet another horrible electron app as I have to deal with when using Microsoft Teams.

https://appleinsider.com/articles/21/08/16/users-lobby-1password-to-abandon-new-electron-version

Hi jdwusami, thanks once again for the feedback.

I respect the fact that you think going with Electron is a mistake - but again, there were a number of engineering and design reasons behind this decision, so our focus here has been what's going to provide the best experience for the customer, as it has been from the beginning.

If possible, we'd love to hear about what specific concerns you have. Does it have to do with the UI? Or how certain workflows in the app? How security measures are implemented? These are all things we are constantly working to improve and perfect.

What I'm trying to say is: not all apps that make some use of Electron are the same, and the fact that 1Password 8 uses it doesn't make it equivalent to other apps that provide a sub-par experience (not singling anyone out in particular here). Rather, we're dedicated to making an app experience par excellence, and so far we've found that the best way to do it is with a combination of languages I mentioned in the post above, which includes (yes) Electron as part of the overall product.

In case you're curious, here are a few resources around this topic:

Our electron hardener, which we have provided for free to the community so that other developers can use it as well: https://github.com/1password/electron-hardener

Mitchell Cohen, product lead at 1Password, discusses Electron app hardening at Northsec conference: https://nsec.io/session/2021-how-to-harden-your-electron-app.html

Users on Reddit have noted that 1Password's performance is: really good!
https://www.reddit.com/r/1Password/comments/o0f3r9/introducing_1password_8_for_windows_early_access/h1vjtr6/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=web2x&context=3

And it's hard to say it better than Roustem did here:
https://1password.community/discussion/comment/608477/#Comment_608477

"We are trying to build the best experience possible with the tools we have today. 1Password desktop app was rewritten from scratch several times and if there is a better technology with clear advantages available tomorrow, we will be there to adopt it.

We argue the differences between AppKit, SwiftUI, Catalyst, Electron, Tauri, etc but it is also a very low-level discussion in many ways. It is very important for us to make 1Password better as a product: add features that were on the back-burner for years, make it easier to new users, make it more powerful for advanced users, support both individual/family and business customers, try to not break existing workflows that people had for years and at the same time also create new better ones."

And in truth, this has already begun to happen. We've been able to roll out a number of new features in just the last few months thanks to the streamlining of processes that the current approach makes possible. The apps will benefit across the board as a result. 👍

jdwusami Best to move on at this point (or stick with 1P7 for as long as possible). Electron isn't going anywhere, despite the massive user complaints. AgileBits has made their decision, and no amount of legitimate complaints and suggestions will change their mind. I've said it multiple times before, but watching what has happened to a company as beloved as AgileBits over the past many months is truly heartbreaking.

PeterG_1P That reddit thread you link to is about the Windows app, which is hardly indicative of the state of the Mac app. To put it nicely, the Windows version of 1Password 7 was not great, so even an Electron app will be better than what was there. On the Mac, however, 1P7 was (and still is) an absolutely beautifully designed application. And despite the strides that have been made with 1P8 for the Mac over the course of this beta period, it simply cannot hold a candle to 1P7 - and it will never be able to as long as it is an Electron app.

This is just my two cents.

PeterG_1P

Does it have to do with the UI?
The UI is ok, it's just not as nice and intuitive as the previous v7. I feel like it's more basic, or simplified if that makes sense. It also suffers the same issue most Electron Apps do - it becomes sluggish over time and requires a hard restart of the App and accompanying helpers/processes to regain fluid UI performance. The Window control icons (close, minimise/hide and maximise) also get half cut off if you have the App window open in the background for a significant portion of time - WhatsApp also does this.

The web browser extensions are also hungrier for system resources than the old 'desktop app dependent' versions - but i guess that isn't really anything to do with Electron, and more just a general development modification for simplicities sake.

I've certainly learnt to hate the Electron App less and less but the mere fact it's still in Early Access/Beta on macOS and is in production on Windows obviously says something.

Being a software developer for 25 years I'm interested in technology and everything you've used to create 1PW8. But as a user I care about usabality and platform integration. Sadly both of those points are substandard in version 8.
Almost every workflow I've regulary used in 7 was either removed or replaced by something else that typically requires much more user interaction than before.
Examples:
* I have only two vaults and the second one is rarely used. I never got into tags. My main feature to organize was switching categories in the sidebar. Now I have an obsolete sidebar and a category switcher that requires more clicks and even worse hides the information, i. e. I have to click to open up a list of categories, have to refocus on this list and click again.
* Search is a total mess. I've used search all the day before. In 7 I didn't had to care about how something in the vault was written. I could just type any part of a word and the result was immediatly shown. Now I get only a fraction of the results because someone at Agilebits thought it might be better to only search for full words and even than hide some results unless you hit CMD + Return. Definately a dealbreaker.
* The password generator is available in the main app and the browser plugin. But why did you remove the QR code scanner from the main app? I typically create accounts including passwords within the main application. Now I'm forced to use the browser plugin just to scan QR codes.

Regarding platform integration:
* I really don't care if you use Electron are something else as long as you stick with the most basic UI principles of the OS. Don't use a complete custom UI, i. e. on macOS windows have either 'traffic lights' in the top left corner in order to close/maximise/minimise a window or in case of modal dialogues cancel and ok buttons. They never ever have a X in the top right corner.
* macOS offers a systemwide accent color configurable by the user. Please use it.

I still have a 1Password account but I only use it on my phone. And I’m still looking for another app but have a hard time to go all-in. Every time I try the new 1P8 on my Mac, I just feel sad. Hard to explain but… But that’s where we are heading, and I keep looking for another solution 😜

DitchComfort if you have an iPhone the inbuilt password manager is actually pretty darn good. The only place where 1P is better than it for auto filling is for OTPs

+1 on viswiz's points.

I agree with all of them, but also:

• the UI elements all look enough like native elements (but never quite right) that I expect them to act like them, but they all have different behaviours that are jarring every time I use them. Even text boxes are close-but-not-quite, dropdowns are particularly guilty of this. If you'd gone for a very visually different design it would actually bug me less, but the uncanny valley you've hit is the worst place to be. It's an indecisive middle-of-the-road approach. I assume that it stems from 'how can we make this inoffensive on all platforms', but it just feels off everywhere.
• there's an obsession with keyboard shortcuts in 1P8 - every new feature feels like it needs you to memorise some new keyboard shortcut. Search no longer filters a live view, it shows a few suggestions and needs a keyboard shortcut to actually show me results. Quick Access is nothing but this. It's a horrible UI change for me and makes 1P8 massively harder to use.
• old flows are nearly all made longer or replaced with flows that are designed for users with lots of vaults or lots of accounts. The aforementioned search changes, the category changes, the constant pushing of vault collections which makes low numbers of vaults more awkward and annoying to use
• Quick Access requires you to memorise keyboard shortcuts or search syntax to be able to do things that 1Password Mini had actual UI for. It's a horrible approach that is so opaque to use and an absolute usability disaster. Paired with the fact that search doesn't work as well as it used to makes it considerably more awful to use.