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Comment by pupppet | Hacker News Reader

Every time a new MacOS version is announced the 1Password staff must be all sitting around praying Apple doesn't add any more bells and whistles to Keychain.

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I doubt they care about Mac customers. If they did, they would have avoided ruining the app's UI so that customers don't have a good reason to jump ship at the first opportunity.

They only really care about enterprise customers as is pretty obvious, but they haven’t QUITE made it crappy enough for me to bother switching to keychain entirely.

The new UI is such a downgrade. It took the app from feeling well made to feeling like your average bloaty SaaS app. I’m gonna have to figure out an alternative once 1PW 7 is no longer supported.

Keychain is… not that bad. It works for almost all passwords/general use cases. It definitely is feature-lite compared to dedicated password managers, but it makes that up in integrations if you’re primarily in the Apple ecosystem.

For the past year or so I thought I was being silly for feeing the 1P has gotten so clunky. Now I get it. I had no idea they had migrated to Electron, but the app is much shittier. It can’t even remember which window size I’ve set it to, and prefers to reopen in whatever size it wants. (We’re a business customer.)

I don't mind the UI on Mac so much as weird bugs where the chrome extension doesn't always work and I need to quit and restart.

The iPad app UI is far more frustrating to use, mainly because the search function is hidden behind a down scroll now.

I'm keeping an eye on Proton at the moment as I use their email and they do have a password manager offering.

> where the chrome extension doesn't always work and I need to quit and restart

In my experience, this happens when there is a new Chrome version, but you haven't updated to it yet. When you quit and restart Chrome, it can update. Next time the extension stops working, check chrome://settings/help.

Yeah 1Password 8 is really bad compared to 7, ignoring how awful electron is for a password manage it doesn't even have basic feature parity like finding and removing duplicates, completely hiding vaults etc

They started with a huge advantage and squandered it with a buggy cloud subscription model and an electron downgrade. Their fate is their own at this point.

Agreed, sadly 1Password's biggest threat is themselves at this point, not Keychain.

This was the release that got me to migrate from 1P to Keychain. Keychain finally has enough features and the 1P’s browser extension has been finicky for me and the UX of 1P8’s desktop app feels like a considerable downgrade from 7.

Can Keychain store anything that's not passwords yet? I like using 1Passwords for all sorts of stuff like SSN, drivers license, passport details, membership details, SSH keys etc

I use the apple notes app with the lock feature for this. And sometimes without the lock feature.

I don’t see that happening tbh, since they made Secure Notes for this purpose which (i would assume they believe) offers a better experience than storing not-logins with logins. Secure Notes offer the same level of security as the keychain IIRC.

Yes, you can create a "New Secure Note Item"

Is this in Passwords or the Notes app?

I tried Notes app with the Lock but it requires another password while I want it all under the FaceID/iCloud password like the settings-passwords

Is there a secure note option in passwords - mine all require username web url and password.

You might have to check your settings. Previously there was a separate password for Notes, but now there is an option to keep it tied to your account's password

it is the Keychain Access app

Oh that’s only on MacOs not iOS, right?

I am pretty sure it is limited to the desktop OS.

Yes, it can. You can store Secure Notes in your keychain with Keychain Access on macOS.

I can't use Keychain on Windows, I assume?

You can: https://support.apple.com/en-gb/guide/icloud-windows/icw2bab...

You can now https://support.apple.com/en-ca/guide/icloud-windows/icw2bab...

As others said, you can in chrome, but it's not as smooth as in iOS and MacOS as it only works in Chrome, and doesn't work in apps (like steam or other game launchers).

Wait, using it on a Mac let's it fill passwords from apps like Steam?

In Safari, keychain and 1password certainly are fighting harder for my attention than they have in the past. I want to use a workflow where passkeys live in iCloud and normal login pairs live in 1Password. 1Password's passkeys implementation is a nice way to keep keychain from being the only player in the game but I like how much faster they work stored inside of the OS better.

Really the only thing keeping me from going all in on keychain is the lack of a UI for the times when it doesn’t autocomplete or I need a password in terminal or something.

I’d pay for something that provided a global hotkey and an interface that isn’t nested in Settings.

The keychain app gets you out of settings, though leaves much to be desired.

Yeah - I’ve never understood why I need to type my user password twice to reveal a keychain password. It’s really annoying.

Am I right in that keychain only really works in safari? Or are there recent changes?

Apple made a chrome plugin to allow usage of iCloud Keychain passkeys in Chrome but not sure how well it works: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/icloud-passwords/p...

I think this is one reason why 1Password is pivoting to enterprise.

Consumer password management companies compete on the multi-device angle, including Android and Windows. That's not something Apple's going to touch for awhile.

Apple is also certainly not going to touch the more enterprise aspects of password management.

1Password overdid it a while ago for me and I switched to KeePassXC. It is certainly not as polished as 1Password but the developer team is very responsive and since I started using it, especially on macOS, things have improved a lot already. It is a pleasure to watch things evolve and Passkey support is the next big thing that will be added. Compared to Keychain Access, KeePassXC works cross platform and I need that, since my devices are cross platform. Also helps to avoid vendor lock-in.

I believe Apple offered to acquire them but they chose to go the VC money route instead, adding features for corporate customers.

That's why they switched to focus on Enterprise customers a while ago. It's all about being a secret store for Kubernetes and other deployments now. I doubt they lose a lot of sleep over personal licenses and the loud group of people complaining about the non-native macOS UI (Including myself there).

I've been using Keychain for years now, and it's the only password manager a regular user will ever need imo.

It’s a matter of time that they get sherlocked

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