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Hi, long-time user, customer, and word-of-mouth recommender of 1Password for the nine years my Hacker News account has been active (give or take a few months).

Hi, long-time user, customer, and word-of-mouth recommender of 1Password for the nine years my Hacker News account has been active (give or take a few months). This is a big announcement that I'll have to chew on to understand what this means. Can you quantify the "needless development churn and hassle for both customers and our support team" in some way? Presumably, 1Password 7 and its ancestors used native macOS APIs, which meant some degree of that given you had to do something different on Windows and/or Linux. I don't know what your support team has had to endure, but as a long-time sample size of 1, I've been incredibly satisfied with the way you've designed and engineered the macOS application (and the iOS app too!) to date; I'd be hopeful that whatever tradeoffs y'all will be making moving to Electron, the "native" feel of the macOS client wouldn't be sacrificed. Is there anything you can speak to there that I should prepare for with 1Password 8?

jl_agilebits 5y ago
> Can you quantify the "needless development churn and hassle for both customers and our support team" in some way? Sure, happy to elaborate on that! Since we were rebuilding our app from the ground up, it was a significant slow-down on development to create a user interface for both Electron and SwiftUI, requiring two separate teams of platform developers for every feature we needed to implement. There were also concerns by the documentation and support teams that we would need two separate sets of instructions for many common tasks, due to small differences in layout and look between the applications. Eventually, we had to make the tough decision to focus on a single common framework for desktop. This will allow us to ship features across every single platform far quicker than we could before. > I'd be hopeful that whatever tradeoffs y'all will be making moving to Electron, the "native" feel of the macOS client wouldn't be sacrificed. We've tried our very best to keep the experience the same so that the transition from 7 to 8 is smooth, and from my point of view 1Password 8 feels right at home on macOS - I especially love our new translucent sidebar. That being said, this is still in an early access stage, so there are bound to be hiccups and UI issues that need to be resolved. Please let us know if you run into any problems or have suggestions on how we can improve. And thank you for being a long-time user!
- stock_toaster 5y ago
  > requiring two separate teams of platform developers for every feature we needed to implement So your margins are more important than your users’ native experiences. Got it.
  - the_lucifer 5y ago
    I mean looking at this I can see why people came to the conclusion that this was primarily a move that VC funding caused even though AgileBits seem to vehemently deny this.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    - psionides 5y ago
      The funny thing is, they were doing just fine for years with just their own money. Now that they have sooo much more money, they suddenly can't afford separate developers for different platforms... they should be able to hire 10x more people now.
  - jl_agilebits 5y ago
    The primary issue with having two separate teams for the same platform was not money, it was time. To be clear: we wanted to build a native app in parallel with our cross-platform Electron solution, and we had the developers to do it. But unfortunately, having an additional team that needed to implement the UI for every single new feature was a significant slow-down, and we collectively realized that we could not meet our deadlines nor maintain this long term. I'm sorry for not being more clear earlier as to why we couldn't support two separate teams for the same platform. Hopefully this clears up any confusion.
    - jimsimmons 5y ago

jl_agilebits 5y ago

> Can you quantify the "needless development churn and hassle for both customers and our support team" in some way? Sure, happy to elaborate on that! Since we were rebuilding our app from the ground up, it was a significant slow-down on development to create a user interface for both Electron and SwiftUI, requiring two separate teams of platform developers for every feature we needed to implement. There were also concerns by the documentation and support teams that we would need two separate sets of instructions for many common tasks, due to small differences in layout and look between the applications. Eventually, we had to make the tough decision to focus on a single common framework for desktop. This will allow us to ship features across every single platform far quicker than we could before. > I'd be hopeful that whatever tradeoffs y'all will be making moving to Electron, the "native" feel of the macOS client wouldn't be sacrificed. We've tried our very best to keep the experience the same so that the transition from 7 to 8 is smooth, and from my point of view 1Password 8 feels right at home on macOS - I especially love our new translucent sidebar. That being said, this is still in an early access stage, so there are bound to be hiccups and UI issues that need to be resolved. Please let us know if you run into any problems or have suggestions on how we can improve. And thank you for being a long-time user!

stock_toaster 5y ago
> requiring two separate teams of platform developers for every feature we needed to implement So your margins are more important than your users’ native experiences. Got it.
- the_lucifer 5y ago
  I mean looking at this I can see why people came to the conclusion that this was primarily a move that VC funding caused even though AgileBits seem to vehemently deny this.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - psionides 5y ago
    The funny thing is, they were doing just fine for years with just their own money. Now that they have sooo much more money, they suddenly can't afford separate developers for different platforms... they should be able to hire 10x more people now.
- jl_agilebits 5y ago
  The primary issue with having two separate teams for the same platform was not money, it was time. To be clear: we wanted to build a native app in parallel with our cross-platform Electron solution, and we had the developers to do it. But unfortunately, having an additional team that needed to implement the UI for every single new feature was a significant slow-down, and we collectively realized that we could not meet our deadlines nor maintain this long term. I'm sorry for not being more clear earlier as to why we couldn't support two separate teams for the same platform. Hopefully this clears up any confusion.
  - jimsimmons 5y ago