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

I'm sorry for the trouble here. It's not ideal and I wish we were able to make things perfect for everyone.

As mentioned it would have been nicer if we were able to bundle 1Password for Safari into an entirely new app as we wouldn't have needed to make changes in to the existing app and avoid breaking anything. While that would have had many upsides we're not ready to introduce 1Password 8 for iOS to the world yet and so we would have needed to create a 3rd app if we went this way. It's really tricky managing multiple SKUs in the store as there's limitations to what you can do there so we need to keep as few SKUs as possible.

Ideally we would have simply supported all approaches in 1Password for Safari on iOS within 1Password 7 but it's just not something we could pursue. We pushed standalone vaults as far as we could and needed the features of 1Password.com to make today's release possible.

A big part of this stems from 1Password for Safari using a lot of the technology and implementations from 1Password 8, which was completely rewritten from the ground up to take full advantage of our 1Password.com service. You can read all about this decision and why we choose this approach in this mini-essay I wrote in another thread.

That post was written with 1Password for Mac and Windows in mind but many of the points cover iOS and iPad as well. And on the technical side of things, 1Password for Safari is a standalone extension within Safari that needs to live completely within ~6MB of memory (in total, minus ~2MB for some preallocated frameworks).

Furthermore, Safari does its best to protect battery life and keep things snappy as well, so it ensures extensions finish in a timely fashion. Frankly I don’t see how we could have made standalone vaults work there with the same great experience.

I’m sure given enough time and effort we could have found ways to hack support in and been at least partially successful, but with the subpar experience combined with standalone vaults not being included in 1Password 8, we decided to go all in on memberships while designing and implementing support for Safari. And I’m glad we did as there’s no way we could have been here on iOS 15 launch day if we had added any additional requirements.

With that said, it is unfortunate that some of the functions from the old share sheet are no longer available. A lot of the reasons why we are so excited about the new approach in 1Password for Safari is we can do so much more than we were ever able to do in the share sheet. We were extremely limited in functionality there and it showed. While we weren't able to preserve all the features of the share sheet the most important one by far is filling passwords and we made sure that would continue to support that via Password Autofill for both members and standalone vault users.

I hope that helps. Take care and stay safe,

++dave;
1Password Founder