Overcoming 25+ years of muscle-memory

roustem How much investment would it actually take to make a non-modal preference window on the Mac. This is something that other cross-platform Electron apps have managed to accomplish seemingly without issue. Are you really trying to tell us, even with the size (and supposed talent) of your dev team, that implementing certain platform-specific UI elements is just too much work to manage? If so, then I have to seriously question the commitment of you and the dev team in continuing to maintain 1Password as a world-class password manager (which, for the record, 1P7 is absolutely world class; 1P8 not so much). Furthermore, why not make a non-modal preference window for all platforms? Instead of shoehorning a non-Mac interface style on Mac users, why not bring some of the Mac goodness to other platforms?

I'm also quite confused by your argument that just because some apps don't follow Apple's HIG, that this somehow excuses 1Password for not following them. The three first-party Mac apps are horrible examples given that a.) Chess is from the NeXTSTEP days and has barely seen an update since it was first ported; b.) both Music and TV are Catalyst apps, and not only are Catalyst apps still very much a work in progress, they are considered by many to not be good examples of proper Mac apps (though that is changing with the likes of the excellent Catalyst-based Messages app).

As for the other apps, let's go through each one to discover why they are horrible examples to give.

We'll start with the most obvious offenders, all of them Electron apps (which speaks for itself):
* Evernote
* GitHub Desktop
* Logseq
* Notion
* Obsidian
* Slack
* Visual Studio Core

Let's next look at web browsers:
* Brave - based on Chromium (which ironically is what Electron is based upon), Chrome itself doesn't have a proper Preference window and largely follows Google's own "Material Design" GUI guidelines. Chrome (and subsequently Brave, or really any Chromium-based browser) has a decidedly non-Mac feel to it
* Firefox - another example of a web browser eschewing Apple's HIG for its own. Firefox has a good browser engine, but its interface has been a perpetual work in progress for years. Not a great example to use here.
* Microsoft Edge - not only is this a Microsoft product, it's another browser based on Chromium, and thus will have the same UI quirks as all Chromium apps.

And now some of the outliers:
* Acrobat Reader - Adobe is notorious for ignoring interface guidelines regardless of the platform, and I can't imagine you'll find a single person that praises the Acrobat Reader interface.
* LanScan - this app has no preference window at all, mostly because it simply doesn't need one; and it is not out of the ordinary for certain Mac apps to eschew a preference window when it is simply not needed.
* Journey by Moleskin - to me, this is an app with an interface that is simply trying to be too clever for its own good, with subtle animations all over the place that get old rather quickly.
* Pocket Casts - this is literally an iOS app, so of course it's going to have a different style of interface - one designed for an iPhone/iPad, NOT a Mac.
* Spotify - the Spotify preferences screen is just a tragedy of terrible interface design, full stop. (The app itself isn't terrible, but hardly a shining example of good UX).

Finally, I felt Ishtar Commander needed to have its own entry, because honestly, this is just a terribly silly example. This is a game! Given that one of the main purposes of a game is to let you escape from the real world for a little while, game interfaces are designed to take over the whole computer (hence why they almost always run in full screen mode), to pull you out of your day-to-day computer usage.

The bottom line is that if you and the dev team really wanted to add a proper non-modal Mac style preference window to 1Password, you absolutely could with not a ton of effort. But you simply don't want to, because you don't want to spend the effort (i.e. money) on it. Instead of 1Password 8 being a world class experience on all platforms, with a UI that is at once familiar but also adapts to each platforms UX guidelines, 1P8 has become just another "barely good enough" app. Maybe that's what you were going for? On the one hand, having an app that looks the exact same across all platforms; but on the other hand, leading to an experience that is simply OK, but never great.