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Comment by lycopodiopsida | Hacker News Reader

Arguably, Agilebits just focuses more on enterprise customers now. The interesting thing about enterprise users is that you don’t care that much about UX anymore. Your users have no choice and software is bought by management based on some metrics and marketing demos. We, macOS users, are just not the target audience anymore.

I would argue, that the current company is only a shell of the former Agilebits, which honestly cared about users and their needs. But such is the nature of big business, it appears.

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We’ve been a 1Password for Business customer for about 3 years. But we’re looking at moving to something like BitWarden because it has true SSO support, while 1Password doesn’t.

1Password has been very clear this is a feature they’re not interested in supporting, and our users have been very clear that remembering a second password and secret key for their password manager is too difficult.

AgileBits is presenting itself as Enterprise friendly, but isn’t. It has its own vision on how the enterprise should work.

SSO for unlocking the password vault?

>But we’re looking at moving to something like BitWarden because it has true SSO support, while 1Password doesn’t.

That is what I am curious about, too: starting the the v8 of 1Password I just can't justify paying premium for 1Password anymore as a mac user who has a family account. Both have Electron clients and cloud-only vaults, but Bitwarden subscription is 40USD/yr., and 1Password charges 60USD/yr.

In my opinion 1PW just lost any advantage it had, at least for non-business users.

That’s fair enough, but being Electron or not isn’t the only criteria to judge a UI. Personally after testing both (on Linux) I found 1Password’s UI to be better enough compared to Bitwarden to warrant the price difference.

We use 1P for our business and honestly, I’m not sure how fit for purpose it is in the enterprise domain. We only have about 20 people using it and it’s a not that great from an admin perspective.

Simple things like sharing a single password between teams mean you need to create a shared vault that both teams have access to and put the pw in there. Or you send a copy, but now you have 2 copies that aren’t linked.

You can add files but they’re weirdly half linked to passwords, floating about without anyway to see which passwords they’re linked to. Sure, it’s not a file store, but you have to live with the crappy ui or use some other tooling for other metadata.

When I last checked, there was no obvious way to audit which accounts had accessed a given pw. Or to see all the passwords that an account had accessed.

Maybe people manage to make it work for them but as our company grows, I’m going to be pushing harder and harder to remove it from the organisation (and I’ve been using it since 2010).

You should give a try to bitwarden.

I've been using Lastpass for, what, 10 years (met the founders at a conference/fair by then) and dumped it for bitwarden after having had a closer look.

They are missing one thing which I have not seen elsewhere either: accounts where all saved creds automatically go into a shared vault.

When Apple announced their significant upgrades to iCloud Keychain a few months ago, I immediately thought that it was unfair "Sherlocking" of 1Password. AgileBits had been out there offering a first class macOS/iOS password manager experience for a long time and it seemed rude of Apple to step on their turf so blatantly.

I still have sympathy for AgileBits, but these feelings have diminished somewhat now.

What upgrades are you referring to? I’m looking to migrate from 1Password but maybe keychain will be good enough.

Does it work with other browsers on the Mac?

https://www.macrumors.com/2021/06/11/macos-monterey-password...

They've released a cross-platform Chrome extension, plus a native Windows client. No Firefox as far as I'm aware, sadly.

If their Mac app has been sherlocked to death, why wouldn’t this make you feel more sympathy?

Do you think Apple knew AgileBits was dropping their Mac version and stepped into the opening? Or did AgileBits step back once it became pointless to compete with an upcoming OS feature?

These significant upgrades to iCloud Keychain are still in beta (macOS Monterey and iOS 15). If AgileBits' announcement represents their response to a competitor that hasn't even released yet, if it means they're diminishing their own product before the competition has even arrived, then I would have zero sympathy for them.

Quite frankly that seems an absurd hypothesis. In the face of competition from Apple, the correct response by AgileBits should have been to double down on product quality and pushing feature depth.

Wellll... Apple is something more than a competitor in this situation. Their own OS; world’s most valuable and profitable company; and so forth.

I can hear the AgileBits marketing department theme song / threnody... https://youtu.be/9yQKDj_V4Gk

>We, macOS users, are just not the target audience anymore.

I'm not entirely sure this is indicative of that, I mean what were they supposed to do? SwiftUI is clearly the right choice for iOS, but if they use it on Mac they would have to develop a separate implementation for older Macs, and anyway they hit problems where SwiftUI just flat out isn't mature enough on Mac anyway.

The only other alternative would have been to rewrite the native client again in ObjC, knowing that they would have to rewrite it again in the near future anyway. All of these options suck really badly. I think it's just unfortunate timing given the current state of development of SwiftUI. do you really see a better pragmatic way forward?

This way hopefully in future when older Macs cease being an issue, and SwiftUI on Mac matures, hopefully they will port the iOS code base to Mac. At least the fact they went with SwitfUI on iOS instead of a cross platform framework is a good sign.

Swift code runs on older macs so no need to go objc

SwiftUI only runs on MacOS 10.15 or later.

Yeah but you can do appkit with swift without having to use objc

That's still a big chunk of new code you need to write only to throw it away a few years later. Even with just a handful of developers for a year or two that's still millions your throwing away, meanwhile you're developing this Electron thing for the Mac anyway so using that for a few years instead has zero cost.

Appkit isn't going anywhere and you can migrate piece by piece to swiftui

> The only other alternative would have been to rewrite the native client again in ObjC

They had a macOS native client that was running beautifully and was a reference example of high-quality Mac software. I can understand wanting to improve the backend but the rewriting of the UI was an entirely unforced error.

And it’s made extra clear that they’ll expend effort for a native app on a platform their business is worried about losing, so this really does feel like quite the slight. I’m certainly done with them when v7 stops working.

It looks like they're doing a pretty comprehensive rewrite, so sticking with the legacy client isn't an option.

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