1Password 8 - Non-native feel

roustem I refer to your August 20 post - Part of the initial argument as to why you swapped to electron in the first place was because you wanted to ship by September, and that was an important deadline to meet. I understand development often takes longer than anticipated but can you see from a user perspective how frustrating it might be?

On one hand you're saying 1P8 has built from the ground up to be better for users. You start off trying to do it the right way by using SwiftUI and then because you can't polish it enough to deliver in time for September you make the decision to move it to Electron a technically inferior way of doing it. One that hurts a user experience.

Given you've now pushed the final release date back so significantly can you please dump Electron, start from where you left off and go back to SwiftUI? Electron is completely a no-go on macOS.

1P_Rob I refer to your post of AUgust 20 where you say you tried separate apps and WIndows users would tell you it didn't work. Using both platforms with 1P7 since it came out, this is flat out incorrect. Some Windows users may not have liked it, but i know a lot of windows users who did like it and thought it worked incredibly well.

It looks like there is no way back with 1Password. So I decided for myself to look for alternatives. One candidate is Strongbox - Keepass-compatible, a real macOS app, countless applications on all kinds of platforms.

I have until 05.2022 (family account already cancelled) to test alternatives. We'll see how it goes... but as soon as I find something, that's it for me with 1Password. Too bad actually.

I think one of the strongest points of 1Password is and was the native app feel and the design. Going to electron is maybe a business decision but not a users centric decision. Don’t forget a user don’t botter when you will release a new “feature” for the app if it will be in September or later. Take the Apple philosophy “it just works”. That means only release when it is ready and works great. Even if that means postpone it till it’s ready. Only the user experience will count and if the app will be supported on the latest releases and is secure. It stands or falls with that. It’s clear you want to release at the same time new iPhones will be released and iOS 15. The choose to go electron because then older versions of MacOS will be supported,… is bullshit! Users clearly understands that when a computer gets older newer software will not be supported anymore because of new technologies. Also the older versions of 1Password 6 or 7 are still available. Why not make the requirements of the new app that it only support recent versions of MacOS? And for how long is SwiftUI already available? Is it not that going the route of Swift you have one cross-platform user interface layer with iOS,iPadOS,MacOS? And is Apple not willing to help since you are one of the top Apps in the AppStore for years now and are praised by them? It sound for me the quickest route to take but not the best decision for user experience.

I'm giving you the benefit of the doubt, but it doesn't feel right to me.

It should be working for nightlies. When it does, you'll see a prompt that says 1Password will update the next time it's restarted, with an option to restart now. If that's not happening, we might want to collect some logs to see what's going on. Let me know.

It did indeed work like that yesterday (have not turned on my Mac today).

I completely understand that using something like Electron and a common back-end written in Rust makes it easier to develop and maintain a desktop app for Windows, macOS and Linux. And I also understand that even for us users there is an indirect benefit because you will be able to iterate faster and deliver new stuff more often.

But we have a price to pay: Such an app very likely can only be an "ok" citizen in any of the supported OSes, but will never be able to offer the best possible UX on any of them. 1PW8 clearly shows that at the moment. UX is ok, but it feels like less a native macOS app than 1PW7. I'm confident that it will be good enough once it has sufficiently matured to be released, but I doubt that it will be really great on any platform.

So, please prove me wrong ;-)

Does that work for the Nightly channel?

I have this option enabled, but have to manually install updated so far.

XIII it should be working for nightlies. When it does, you'll see a prompt that says 1Password will update the next time it's restarted, with an option to restart now. If that's not happening, we might want to collect some logs to see what's going on. Let me know.

It leaks memory like crazy

@"Mirek Petricek" thanks for pointing that out. One of my teammates is looking into a memory leak today, so hopefully we'll have that patched up soon.

I've re-installed 8 and the nightly updates are making a difference and it's smoothing out quickly and I feel it will end up being a polished product.

rwakeford thanks for saying so! We aren't going to be happy with a less-than-polished product either.

My big question is what ever happened to the native Mac Password Auto-Fill support your team had demonstrated?

@dppeak we spent a bit of effort on that but we weren't able to get it where we wanted to in Big Sur. With Monterey, we're hoping to re-evaluate. There's nothing related to Electron in the way, though. This would be implemented in Swift and we have a good chunk of Swift in 1Password 8 already.

ref: dev/core/core#6444

roustem Thanks. So we have at least a year before we have to move. That gives us time to see how bad the end-state of the electron app is, and make a decision on moving to another product.

My big question is what ever happened to the native Mac Password Auto-Fill support your team had demonstrated? This is my biggest issue with the latest moves. Is that initiative dead now that you are moving to an Electron (non-native) app? I have some passwords that are in my system keychain and will remain that way so the 1Password auto fill just conflicts with the native menu. I have to disable 1Password's menu, so I can not use your new Safari extension. I have looked at a great app called Minimalist that imports 1Password, offers native UI, and native Password AutoFill support and if you won't be supporting Apple's AutoFill extension, then I will be moving to that app and saying goodbye to 1Password after 15+ years of using it. Contrary to what your support team says, support for Apple's Password AutoFill is possible (you do it on iOS).

+sure if it is due to being beta, but the app feels like a major downgrade in features, reliability, look & feel, and pretty much everything.
I remember when they completely changed Skype and there was a justifiable uproar as it was so completely different but it's now (for me at least) a great application. I installed 1Password 8 and went straight back to 7 as it just didn't "feel" right . However I decided to try again and I've re-installed 8 and the nightly updates are making a difference and it's smoothing out quickly and I feel it will end up being a polished product.

The non-native feel is one thing, but the memory usage of the 1Password 8 is from a different planet. The app feels slow (M1 Macbook Air). It leaks memory like crazy:

Not sure if it is due to being beta, but the app feels like a major downgrade in features, reliability, look & feel, and pretty much everything.

I hope it is not too late to stop this update and return back to the drawing boards.