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Comment by mikece | Hacker News Reader

As cool as a native code back-end for Bitwarden would be I would be more interested in seeing vendor native mobile apps (Swift/Xcode, Kotlin/Android Studio) and putting the Xamarin code out to pasture. Would also like to see an improvement in the desktop Electron app as well or at least get it to feature parity with the web vault. All of that said Bitwarden is a fantastic product and I recommend that over every other server-based password manager out there.

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Why move away from Xamarin? It works. Reduces development needs. Xamarin iOS uses Ahead-of-Time compile which is pretty close to native at that point. Phones are fast enough now to handle a little extra UI layer code like I'm sure Swift and Kotlin have. Most end-users don't even know what Xamarin is.

Bitwarden on iOS suffers from high latency user interaction, it’s much less usable than the iOS native keychain for this reason. I assumed the bottleneck is the public API for password managers, but maybe part of it is Xamarin?

The bitwarden mobile apps are using Xamarin? That's actually pretty impressive...I've never had any of the weird issues with the bitwarden app that I've had with other Xamarin apps in the past.

The desktop app looks and feels like an electron app, so I'm far less impressed by it. At the very least it would be nice to have it in Qt or something like that.

Bitwarden Mobile: https://github.com/bitwarden/mobile

I will freely admit I am strongly biased against Xamarin as there are so few cases where I think it's unequivocally the right choice, and Bitwarden isn't one of them. It would make more sense to take the work done in their desktop electron app and use that as part of an Ionic hybrid mobile app than to screw around with the layercake of bugs and mismatched APIs that Xamarin is. Moreover, since this is a serious app from a security point of view it really should go full vendor native IMO.

Do you know of any open source mobile apps that are full vendor native for iOS and Android? I'd really like to peruse some examples of that.

I've been delving more into Podcast clients and on Graphene OS (Android) I really like AntennaPod: https://github.com/AntennaPod/AntennaPod

On iOS I pretty much stick with Castamatic and Overcast, both are full native iOS apps but neither are open source. I'm sure there's something listed at http://www.NewPodcastApps.com which is iOS and full Xcode native.

UPDATE: 21 Open source apps written in Swift (including one I use every day: Firefox for iOS): https://medium.mybridge.co/21-amazing-open-source-ios-apps-w...

From a cursory look it seems that OsmAnd [1] and Signal [2] are native for both platforms. Signal Desktop looks like it's Electron-based, though.

[1] popular OpenStreetMap client, https://github.com/osmandapp/

[2] popular messaging app among privacy advocates, https://github.com/signalapp

"desktop electron app and use that as part of an Ionic hybrid mobile app"

Whatever you think of Xamarin, there is a special place in hell for all the buggy JS based mobile software. Its not an improvement, just a different flavour of crap.

> desktop electron app

> Moreover, since this is a serious app from a security point of view it really should go full vendor native IMO.

hmm

> The desktop app looks and feels like an electron app, so I'm far less impressed by it.

That is because it IS an Electron app.

> At the very least it would be nice to have it in Qt or something like that.

Sure, I hope so too. Unfortunately there are very few serious alternative password managers that are not using Electron for the desktop app these days. Seems like 1Password is on the way out too.

Yeah, it is kind of amazing how quickly 1pw went to hell. It was a great app at one time. Then they forced cloud storage, subscriptions, Electron... it is like they decided to start acting like a private capital sunsetting cash extractor.

keepassxc is Qt based and a serious alternative. I've been using it for >3 years and have only good things to say about it.

I've never noticed the app is made by Xamarin. Quite impressive app.

> All of that said Bitwarden is a fantastic product and I recommend that over every other server-based password manager out there.

Do you want to share what makes you think Bitwarden is superior to other selfhosted, open-source solutions (e. g. Passbolt, Passwork, Psono)?

So far, Bitwarden has an Android app (two of those didn't), has been security audited (I didn't see anything for those other ones), and the biggest thing is Bitwarden has a much better pricing structure around non business users. It has a free tier and plans for families/non business users, as well as business use. Those others had nothing comparable that I could see except for a limited free tier.

Feature wise (ignoring the mobile apps), some of those seem to have some comparable features like emergency access, sharing, folders, etc, but locked behind a pricing structure that makes them less useful.

So from a look at those other ones, Bitwarden is the superior product for non business/security conscious family use at least. And for business use I don't see how those other ones are better anyway.

I admit Bitwarden is probably the most advanced, but the alternatives I named above (Psono, Passbolt, Passwork) seem not that far behind and some of your research seems a bit superficial.

> Bitwarden has an Android app (two of those didn't)

That's just wrong. All three of the alternatives I mentioned have an Android app. I haven't used any of them, though.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.psono.pson...

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.passwork.p...

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.passbolt.m...

> has been security audited (I didn't see anything for those other ones)

A quick search turns up at least some auditing activity:

Passbolt: https://www.passbolt.com/incidents

Psono: https://doc.psono.com/admin/asvs/overview.html (self-audit)

Looking more closely at Passwork, they claim to have open/auditable source code, but I can't find any public code. So they are out of the game anyway.

> Bitwarden has a much better pricing structure around non business users. It has a free tier and plans for families/non business users, as well as business use. Those others had nothing comparable that I could see except for a limited free tier.

Psono's full-featured enterprise version is free for anyone with up to 10 users. I don't see any such generous offer at Bitwarden or elsewhere.

And both, Psono and Passbolt offer unlimited business tiers for only 3€ per user per month which seems to be in the range of what Bitwarden costs. I don't really see your argument for the pricing.

For me, it's that you don't have to self-host it if you don't want to. You can seamlessly switch between self- and cloud-hosted.

All three of the alternative solutions I mentioned above have cloud/SaaS versions as alternative to the selfhosted tiers.

There is some serious thought going into Bitwarden.

For example, what happens if I get hit by a bus? Oh, they've already thought of that: https://bitwarden.com/help/article/emergency-access/

The peculiar problems faced by families, work organisations, 2fa - they've put some time into thing about every sub-problem I've come up with.

Well, just about everything. I'd love if they would let me run my own read only backup servers - ie, a server that mirrors my data stored on theirs, that my device will connect to if theirs isn't up, and that supports a read only version of the web interface.

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