Electron

I’ve been a paying customer since 1Password 4, and never had occasion to use the forums until today. Like so many others in this thread, I had used other password managers in the past. Some were bad, but most were fine. I was a LastPass user when I discovered 1Password and for the first time ever, I was delighted with a password manager. Not just satisfied, but DELIGHTED! Do the people at AgileBits know how truly rare this? How many companies can truly say they delight their customers? Not just meet their needs, but go above and beyond in all the right ways so that their customers become enthusiasts and evangelists. On top of it, your app was a premiere Mac and iOS app. The experience of using 1P on a Mac has gotten some people to switch to Macs from other platforms, and the experience 1P provides on the Mac has convinced so many Mac users to choose 1P over the many compete, including Apple’s own baked in solution. You had two incredibly beneficial positive feedback loops going that came about because you had a native Mac app that felt like the best that a Mac could offer. It’s not perfect but I’d say 1P7 is easily in the top tier of Mac apps for UX. It’s a titan.

I’ve read the post on why you’ve decided to go to Electron. I understand that maintaining multiple discretely programmed products meant more time and money spent maintaining feature parity, and splitting your resources to maintain multiple platform code bases. However, I think your priorities are in the wrong place. I’ve never used 1P6 or 1P7 and ever thought “I wish this had more features”. And when you would announce new features, I always felt the release schedules allowed time for users to fully integrate those new features into their workflows. I can think of so many apps absolutely riddled with features, including password managers, where I only want or need about 20% of them. And of course I’m just one person and other people might want/need the 80% I don’t, but I would still argue that more features for the sake of more features isn’t a net positive for anyone. From the outside looking in, and from the point of view of a daily user of 1P for years, the feature rollouts being limited by the need to maintain multiple native apps meant that when you did implement features, they were all really good and useful additions that were well implemented.

But, like so many others, I wouldn’t care about Electron at all if Electron apps could convincingly be made to the standards of native MacOS apps. If you could pull that trick you really would be the best designers in the entire Mac ecosystem. And while I heard about the changes in advance of using the beta, I still went in with an open mind. After all, if 8 preserved the core experience and workflows I use daily in 7, I could live with the loss of some of the niceties, although I feel like I shouldn’t have to. However, from the moment I unlocked the beta, I knew this wasn’t it. For all the reasons many people have listed here already, this feels nothing like a Mac app. If you told me this was the new update of LastPass, I’d have said they’re doing a decent imitation of 1Password. Telling me this is the new 1Password makes me so sad and disappointed.

When you first announced your subscription model, there was pushback. One of your main messaging points was that subscriptions help fund further development. I think that messaging convinced a lot of people to pay more over the life of the software even though one time purchase options were still available. I made a conscious decision to become a subscriber because I wanted to help fund the best password manager in the world. And when I needed a family solution, I just jumped onto the family subscription. I didn’t even research the competition, because I was so certain I already had the best possible password manager, because it delighted me every time I used it. To know that my conscious decision to be a subscriber was used to make this…disappointing downgrade of an app feels like a bait and switch. And I get that you’ve taken VC money so you have other masters to appease now, but please don’t cut off your nose to spite your face here. Maybe you’ve done the calculus and determined that taking VC money to chase enterprise clients is a better long term strategy, and one where this unified code base makes total sense. If that is the case, then be honest and tell us that’s the direction you’re going. At least people will respect your honesty. But don’t think that you can ignore or downplay these concerns and still expect your most vocal supporters to remain your most vocal supporters. And at the end of day, as interesting as the Rust backend is, when it comes to the main points of password manager security, you’re at feature parity with Bitwarden. In fact, Bitwarden is a step up in that it’s open source and can be freely audited. And if all I can expect from a password manager going forward is a so-so experience, then it might as well be with a cheaper service that is open source.

The best companies make provisions for redo loops, where they take the time to ask themselves do they need to rethink a decision or change course. I’d say this is a major redo loop opportunity. Please use this beta to solicit meaningful feedback and not just bug reports. Give yourself the opportunity to continue delighting your customers and you can bet we will reward you with even more loyalty. I don’t want to leave 1Password but I absolutely will if this is the direction AgileBits is taking going forward.

P.S. I have to ask, why did you spend so much time on Swift? Surely Catalyst or App Kit would be able to give you the results you need on the front end, with less resource hogging and with the benefits of Apple native frameworks. I find it very odd that it was apparently a choice between Apple’s worst framework for Mac development or Electron.