Huh, I thought it was getting better across the board, and significantly faster. 1P is actually investing in proper cross-platform support, rather than only macOS, so perhaps it's just less attention to detail? The Windows client has become fantastic.

No doubt the Windows app has gotten better but there's a lot of weird quirks with it. Example off the top of my head, if you click on the favorites sidebar and try to search it only searches in favorites. On mac it searches everywhere as I'd expect.

The UI in general also just feels clunky. It's missing that polish the mac app has.

I would expect contextual search, rather than "everywhere" search if I was filtering...

I don't know if I'd use the word "fantastic".

In many ways, I feel that the Windows and Android clients in particular are still second class citizens compared to their Mac/IOS counterparts.

I completely agree. It used to be a very simple piece of software (I’ve used it since the beginning) and they’ve progressively tried to add more UX changes which only confuse and add reliability issues.

Simple tasks like resetting a password or adding an entry in 1Pass can often be frustrating now.

I was a booster until they added a terrible feature to bypass master password on smartphone app with pin.

Previously, with every restart of the phone, you needed to enter master. After, only when the pin is misentered once. They added this ‘new feature’ right when I was installing everything on a new personal laptop. As I recall it, I was entering the master password on my phone, over and over. One of the characters had a shift, which was a pain in the . On iPhone. So I made it lower case. Then, I updated my phone, got the 1password update, and didn’t enter the master for over a month.

Finally, I misentered the pin, and got kicked to the master. Well, you can guess what happened. I was locked out.

You know, a password works because you remember it. My situation revealed the design flaw of bypassing that. If you don’t enter the master for a long time, you lose the habit and increase the risk of losing it.

For me this is the classic example of the corrosive drive to renew a perfectly good product, which ruins the product for some users. But as a designer, I think it’s a fail, but you can’t tell them that.

This is why I like the Authy client on mobile. It periodically asks you for your encryption password just to make sure you can still remember it. Such a thoughtful idea.

I guess if you only ever use the mobile app, but still there's a desktop app and the browser extension to practice your memory.

The pin thing is a big time saver because typing on mobile still sucks, and I'd have to re-type the master everytime I switch between an app and 1Pass. I certainly wouldn't qualify it as a bad feature.

I'm not saying the pin is a 'bad' feature (in fact, I'm using BitWarden now. It uses the same UI pattern [1]). The 'feature enhancement' I'm miffed about is when the master is only ever required when you fail at the pin screen, whereas previously you needed the master after every restart of iPhone.

It's a complex system. I had a use-pattern that naturally emerged from the UI (which required the master after reboot), and my habit of turning off my phone every night. So this "feature enhancement" seemed innocuous, but had, I would argue, the unintended consequence that I lost my memory of the master because of a new feature.

I believe this is exactly the sort of thing a smart company, making a security product, should think about before they decide to add a "feature enhancement".

I mistook the great design of the original 1Password product as an indication of a "smart company" who made great decisions, and great products through testing and design.

Now I feel differently. Now I just see another one-hit wonder, who makes improvements by the wiz-bang theory. New! New! New and improved!

The unpopular decisions to drop the standalone version (local vault) is just more evidence to me that AgileBits isn't special. I put them on a pedestal with devotion and evangelism, but they're no different, and maybe worse.

And if you like this rant, you might also like my rant on TransitApp. hahah!

[1]: Before with 1Password I would have to enter the master once every 1-2 weeks. Now with Bitwarden using the same 1-fail bin to master UI, I think I've not defaulted into master for, I dunno, 6-8 months? But I've learned my lesson. I wrote the master on a piece of paper and tucked it away in a book somewhere on my bookshelf. What could go wrong?

I know this is a larger issue, but I sure feel like software quality for ANY product decreases over time. I've observed this with many, many products in my career. 1P is just the latest example.

I feel like it may be an inexorable and unavoidable consequence of an aging codebase.

It's not a law of nature. Bit rot and technical debt can be counteracted if maintainers are vigilant and focus on quality and maintainability. Unfortunately, not many examples come to mind: the Linux kernel, PostgreSQL, SQLite, OpenBSD, for instance. I can't really think of any instance managed by a for-profit organization.

With the hindsight of 20 years in the industry I believe a lot of it is due to team churn. Once the original developers are all gone much of the codebase becomes a scary black box. When I think about teams I've worked on with an OG dev still around, they've always been far more productive.