1Password 8 - Non-native feel

roustem and all the others at 1Password, you keep talking about all the new features and UI, but no one really answers the obvious... what was wrong with AppKit?

There are a couple of issues here. First, as John Siracusa mention on the recent ATP podcast, is AppKit something that will eventually be replaced by SwiftUI, similar to what happened with Carbon when Cocoa was introduced? I remember using Carbon apps and they didn't feel quite right.

Most importantly, 1Password 8 currently had zero lines of AppKit code written. If we start the new AppKit app today, it could take another year for the app to be ready (I am not overestimating the time because our last full rewrite — 1Password 4 — took over nine months just to get from first public beta to release). At the same time, the existing 1Password 8 will keep moving forward on Linux and Windows and we will never catch up. This was happening with our Windows app for many years and we want to break that cycle.

The team at 1Password has significant funds and resources now, and your saying you cant spend the extra resources in making a UI in AppKit for the Mac?

The software is a strange thing. Often, there is no correlation between how much money you spend on it and the final build quality. That's not to say that we are not willing to spend what it takes to build the best apps — this is what makes 1Password stand out of the crowd.

At this point, we believe that we could build the best version of 1Password for Mac if we focus on a single desktop app and spend our time to make sure it is a good macOS citizen — fast, powerful, pleasant to use, fully integrated with the OS services.