Right. My quibble with standalone experience is that managing multiple vaults is needlessly complicated.
1Password should backup and sync multiple vaults settings via iCloud. But that would make standalone experience almost as nice as 1Password subscription.
Anyway, that does not diminish my overall satisfaction with 1Password. I just wish 1Password 7 was more deserving of major version update.
The problem is that this requires logging into various accounts first. For instance, lets say a user has an iCloud vault and 2 Dropbox vaults. Perhaps those two Dropbox vaults are on different accounts as well. So the user has to be signed into iCloud, Dropbox Account 1 and Dropbox Account 2. We cannot automate this process at all, nor can we really easily keep track of this information. For instance, App Developers do not have the ability to see "which" account a user is signed into via iCloud. We can get some information about Dropbox but we really try not to store information that is identifiable about our users.
It's not an easy thing to solve. I had come up with a number of ideas similar to yours but every time we rolled through those ideas it just felt a lot better to have a real account that users signed into once and everything just appeared. This is why the subscription accounts are so much better in that regard. It's just easier.
Sure it's not impossible to do for standalone vaults but we could never at all reach the same level of ease and seamlessness that we do for 1Password.com accounts.
For iOS specifically, it's going to move a bit more seamlessly into each major version. Due to lack of upgrade type options we tend to roll features out as best we can as they're announced by Apple and make sure we come up with useful features that are unique to a particular major version. For instance Drag and Drop made sense so we released that in 6.9 so it was ready to go with iOS 11's launch. So the "version" number for iOS is going to flow in a way that makes sense for it.
For Mac, we can do upgrades for it, so you'll see that type of thing looked at a lot more in the future and hopefully you'll see much bigger features and changes there. With iOS we don't need to convince people to upgrade because we can't do those upgrades. But for Mac, the next upgrade will have to convince people it's worth upgrading to, therefore it would have to live up to its major version number a bit better.
Hope that makes more sense with regard to the versioning. We're still very proud of 1Password 7, it was not a small amount of work to get it where it is right now. But I am sorry that you don't feel the changes were worthy of a version 7 number.
Any news on 1password 7 for Windows?
I gave another reply to that so I'll paste it here:
I am afraid I don't have any information I can give there. We're being a bit tight lipped about this because we want to under promise and over deliver. I'm also part of our iOS and Mac teams, so I don't really have a lot of direct involvement with the Windows application, so I can't give any insight or nuggets of information I'm afraid. Our Windows team has been very hard at work on version 6, and it's shown. They had to write an app completely from scratch and play catch up with all of our other teams, with fewer developers as well. They've done an amazing job and I look forward to seeing what they do with version 7
I think if you explain things properly, people can understand. People can understand different choices on a menu. People can understand different choices in which "pro" or "regular" versions of other software companies offerings, so why not yours? Just be honest and upfront about it and show people all the choices.
Again, it's about long-term money. Also saving on support cost, which again is money. It's rather transparent. And like I said, that's fine. You are certainly entitled to make as much money as possible with a product. But let's be honest, it just isn't about the user's convenience, but your convenience as well. And bonus...we'll make more money this way!
We altered the wording, the page that describes both, we did a lot of tinkering and experimentation to try to get things right. We spent a lot of time trying to get it right. We provided charts to checkbox off the major important differences, an FAQ to explain things. There was a ton of work done to try to make them live side by side. It was up for months where we had them side by side.
In the end we were spending a lot of time working on how to word something and explain it than we were working on features and bug fixes. At some point we may take another look at it but we felt that important time and energy making 1Password better was being spent working on something we actually had an easy answer to: Just present the best option for a vast majority of users.
I don't see it changing at all until such a time as we charge for an upgrade though. And even then we may keep it a bit under the radar. I'm personally just thankful that the wording of that stuff is not my job because it feels very much like you can't win no matter what you do there. It's very much a damned if you do, damned if you don't situation.
Understood, and thank you for taking the time to reply.
I'll await the 1P 7 Windows newsletter announcement with baited breath
Wishing you a great day.
My pleasure! We're excited to see version 7 for Windows as well. I know our Windows team is looking forward to providing features that our users have been asking for. Hopefully we'll have more to share soon.
It would be great if they actually did that and spent a bit of time getting the new windows app out that supports drop box sync of vaults. Version 6 on windows does not support it so we are stuck on version 4.
Too many companies jumping on the subscription model.
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It's a long time coming, still on version 4 on windows so that I can sync vaults.
At the expense of us who don't want to upgrade our older devices to the latest OS because it slows the devices down.
Sorry, we have different teams for Mac/iOS and Windows. Our Mac and iOS team handles that side, and we have another team for Windows. Work on 1Password 7 for iOS did not impede progress on our Windows application.
With regard to Windows, it was a tricky situation. We had this 1Password 4 app and it worked really well for a lot of people. It was far from perfect but it provided standalone vaults and it worked. It was also pretty feature rich all things considered. The problem was that it was written in Delphi which just isn't super common these days.
When 1Password.com service came out we had nothing at all for it for our Windows users. Our solution was to try to fully modernize 1Password for Windows. Bring it out from under the shadow of it's big brother 1Password for Mac. To do that we needed to fully rewrite it using modern programming languages and APIs. It's now written in C# and uses .NET to accomplish that.
But our focus at first was 1Password.com because we had absolutely nothing for it and you can't sell a business solution (1Password.com includes a business component, called Teams) without a Windows application. So we knew we had to focus on providing an option for that as quickly as possible. So we made the decision to let 1Password 4 for Windows remain as a standalone option, focus 1Password 6 for Windows on 1Password.com and once it reached a point where it was viable there we could look at starting to re-integrate 1Password's standalone vaults into version 6. Turns out our timeframe for that was severely off. So 1Password 7 is where the standalone vault re-integration will occur. But it's a complete rewrite from the ground up.
Our Mac application (and iOS by extension) have existed since the company started. We've rewritten it a few times now (1Password 1, 3 and 4) and along the way have learned a lot and the design of the application is such that we have an extremely solid base that supports future changes really well. Our Mac and iOS team(s) are also much larger because they're the platform we started on and have the most users for. And shared code between Mac and iOS means if we build a feature for one, the backend of that feature can be moved over to the other pretty easily, with UI being the biggest changes. Our Windows and Android teams have no such benefits. Something written on Android has to be written for Android. Something written for Windows has to be written for Windows. But our iOS app gains benefits from our Mac app, and our Mac app gains benefits from our iOS app. Naturally these two are going to jump ahead and remain ahead for some time because they have a natural co-existance that the other two do not glean benefits from.
Hope that helps give some insight. But we really want our Windows application to be something our users love and I think they've made some amazing progress given the short period of time they've had to work on it and how few of them there are. Hopefully it'll reach the point where you are happy with it sooner, rather than later. But I am sorry for the trouble. This particular rewrite is one we hope will set the groundwork for future versions and make it so our Windows application is something our users can be happy to use for a long long time.
