No surprise but looks like standalone users are left out in the cold. Again.
Much as I like and use 1Password every day, I really really do not like the fact that they moved to a hosted model.
I am not happy about them switching to a subscription model and pushing their hosted product and (in this case) making it a requirement. Yes, the standalone version is still around. For now.
As much as I dislike it, it was (unfortunately, for us) probably the right business decision to make. The standalone version will go away at some point in the future. I'm sure of that, I just don't know when it will be.
I'll never switch to their subscription/hosted product but many, many others probably will. That will reaffirm their decision and lead to them eventually completely dropping the standalone macOS version.
Is it begging when you pay $50 per license for the product?
When you buy a product you also buy it because:
1. you expect long term support
2. you believe in the company's values and business model
3. you trust that company to keep protecting your interests
There are many more factors going into a buying decision than "current implementation has features X or Y".
Many people are upset with AgileBits because when they bought 1Password, they did so believing that the company's strategy is aligned with them — i.e. at that time 1Password was THE offline password management solution, the other popular alternative being LastPass, a solution that relies on web interfaces and browser plugins and that has had vulnerabilities because of that.
I should also remind you that by buying a software product, you don't actually own it, you're just licensing it — the difference between a one time fee and a subscription being one of contractual obligations on both sides.
But that difference is irrelevant for the topic at hand, because you don't own the 1Password version that you bought, you cannot make improvements to it by yourself, it's not open source after all. When you buy a car for example, non-shitty / classic models at least, at the very least you are free to repair it and improve it by yourself.
And while true that AgileBits has no contractual obligations to keep delivering updates to their standalone version, I personally couldn't give a shit about the scope of their contractual obligations. Because in society when interacting with other people, we also care about other things and we are free to associate or disassociate ourselves from other people at will and the same rules govern our interaction with companies as well.
So when AgileBits no longer delivers a standalone Windows version, that's a serious reason for concern and a flag that we should look for alternatives.
AgileBits is free to do what they want of course, but we can also vote with our wallets after all. And we are also free to complain.
https://app-updates.agilebits.com/product_history/OPW4
The first release was in June of 2014. The most recent update was September of this year.
Our July 2017 updates included support for our new Native Messaging based extension system so that the extension will continue to work for 1Password 4 for Windows users. This is all offered after we stopped selling 1Password 4 for Windows.
That's 3 years of updates. I'd say that's pretty long term.
So far as I'm aware, nothing is fundamentally broken in 1Password 4 for Windows. It behaves the same way now as it did before we stopped selling it and we've continued to produce fixes and improvements for it.
I'd be curious to understand what it is we did to earn your scorn here. It's almost like we kicked your dog or something. I'm all for constructive criticism, but when the criticism isn't actually in line with reality it starts to make me really doubt the authenticity of the feedback we're getting.
Kyle
AgileBits
I think it comes from a desktop software mentality, where things remained rather static relative to mobile’s rapid changes.
We recently updated 1Password 6 for iOS to work with the new Dropbox version 2 API. Going forward it should be fine until the next Dropbox API changes and presumably that will be a lot smoother than the change from version 1 to 2 that we just did... at least, I hope. We had several people put a lot of time into that transition.
I'm not sure if your comment applied directly to us, but for anyone wondering we tend to update 1Password pretty regularly. We are not at risk of ever being an app that falls on the "not continuously updated" lists I don't think. We were there on day 1 for Drag and Drop on iPad, and day 1 for Face ID. Much like we were there on day 1 for Touch ID and extensions.
1Password for Mac does not depend on Dropbox's API, it syncs directly to the Dropbox folder on the Mac. So as long as that doesn't change it has zero dependency on Dropbox itself.
Kyle
AgileBits
I was just talking about the hypothetical situation for iOS apps (and thus their users) _if_ the apps don't get updates.
We've already announced that 1Password 7 for Mac and 1Password 7 for Windows will continue to offer standalone licensing.
Just a heads up that we're not removing the option for users like yourself that want to continue to use standalone vaults and the licensing to go with it.
That said, if you haven't, I would recommend and least trying our 1Password.com service. It was built and designed from the ground up to work for 1Password. It's an incredibly great experience. If you try it and aren't interested after the trial I'd love to hear your feedback on why. No credit card is necessary to try it.
Kyle
AgileBits
Windows Teams support isn't out of beta yet and regularly has bugs.
And all our apps have bugs :)
I'm not against paying for major version updates. Think of it as a tradeoff between time to market vs. revenue. I'm fine with Teams getting features first (other than security fixes) and paying more infrequently than subscription. It's certainly a business model that previously sustained Agilebits and plenty of other software providers. I get that the HN crowd may not make up a large majority of users at this point but I would think there are still many people that would be happy to spread use of 1Password via word of mouth if you deign to do so.
While we think that subscription makes it easier to use 1Password and not have to purchase apps and upgrades for every platform, there are many users that prefer to use licenses. We are going to support both for upcoming 1Password 7 on Mac and Windows.
The same is true for 1Password service vs host-it-yourself model. I have 30+ vaults shared with my team and family and it is much easier to use the service but I can still keep the data locally and set up sharing manually if needed.
There are some features that are simply not possible without the servers doing the heavy lifting: shared vaults and permissions, travel mode, Chromebooks, etc. I just hope that technically savvy HN crowd understands that and doesn't see it as an attempt to push everyone to have a subscription.
Roustem, Founder of AgileBits
I used to develop 1Password for Mac and iOS. I now develop 1Password service with Go, ReactJS, and Terraform/AWS.
At the moment this is the only way to get 1Password to work on Linux (except older OPW4 with local sync support under Wine). I personally happy about it. You don't have to be, if you don't use cloud. No one pushes you.
I think you have replied to the wrong comment? Parent says "I'm not against the hosted model...I wish them luck"
1Password X is one more thing, additional possibility. Not a replacement.
This particular solution also makes the most sense for our hosted solution. Extensions are sandboxed, so the question becomes how does the standalone vault get its data into the extension sandbox? Once it's there, how do you keep it in sync?
Sure, it's possible, but it's also incredibly fiddly for the average user. While we do talk about Linux here, the extension is still focused at the average user in most ways. So having a user drag a vault into a particular folder deep in their system or really any other solution is just going to be painful and impossible to easily keep in sync.
The extension also has a prerequisite of not relying on our native applications. So any input from that side is a no go.
The other thing with this is we would've literally had to recreate a very large portion of the standalone vault code again. On Mac for instance this code is written in Objective-C, on Windows it was written in Delphi for version 4, it's not present in 1Password 6 for Windows yet but when it does exist there it'll be in C#. Our new 1Password X extension is written in Typescript and Go. So quite literally none of our existing code carries over to this. That's a big barrier to entry.
Our focus on 1Password.com accounts really made the most sense because it can get the users data directly from the web, dump it in the sandbox where necessary, and it can be easily synced. It was also a lot easier because much of our web client's code could be shared with the new extension, so a good chunk of that work was already done.
That said, I am sorry that you aren't happy about this direction we took for the extension. It wasn't specifically done to make any users made it was to try to continue to expand the options available to users.
* Make 1Password available to two new platforms that we didn't support directly: Chrome OS and Linux * Make it possible for users to not have to have the applications installed in order to use 1Password in their browser. This starts to lower the barrier to entry as well. Traditionally the install the app, install the extension bits have been difficult for some users, this helps alleviate that.
None of our decisions here were based on making users unhappy, it was trying to make users lives easier and introducing 1Password to more types of systems.
One of the main reasons we made 1Password.com was because it allowed us to do things that we could not do in the past. This extension is one of those things that we've wanted to do but couldn't. You're bound to see a lot more of this type of thing in the future because standalone vaults limited our options for a long time and we have a long list of features and things we've wanted to implement but couldn't do with standalone vaults. Now we have a backend that can help us make these things happen so we're working on them.
Now, I'm not saying you have to agree with our decisions, but I do hope that giving you some details will help you at least understand why we're doing this. Understanding why doesn't mean you have to agree with it, or like it even, but understanding does mean you can see it from our side too.
We know our standalone users exist, we're not ignoring them, but we have some really exciting projects that we've wanted to work on for a long time and are now able to do so. Like anyone else here on Hacker News we like to work on thing we're excited about too.
For what it's worth we haven't "moved" to a hosted model. We offer our standalone licenses to users who want them. They may not be front and center but they're there. We have also made it clear that we're offering standalone licenses for 1Password 7 for Mac and Windows, so they'll continue to be offered in the future.
And our existing extension is being worked on every day. We hope that some of the changes we've made to this extension will make their way into the extension and applications our standalone users use currently. I'm excited to see how the new 1Password X extension influences the Mac application going forward.
Anyway, I hope that helps a little. If you have questions definitely reach out. I'm happy to help however I can and again, I'm sorry if the release of this new extension has upset you. It certainly wasn't our intent.
Kyle
AgileBits
There is no money there, without a MRR companies won't do it.
I almost regret purchasing 1Password.
edit: So complaining about lack of support for a major operating system is downvote-worthy now. Cool. Keep it classy, HN.
At one point I ran the legacy Windows version under Wine, which even worked with the Chrome extension. Had to disable some extension security policy in Chrome though.
Slightly non-intuitive, but functional.
https://discussions.agilebits.com/discussion/77406/opvault-i...
So it's all relative =)
"It has never been supported on Linux", uh, okay? I'm saying it's totally shitty that a major platform is not supported.