We very much agree that this is a pain point for those with the extension. This feature brought users (and also all our developers who rebuild... often...) a huge smile and productivity boost, so removing it was not easy. We had some fundamental issues that affected the way this feature worked which pushed us to rework it. We wanted to share more news[1] once we had some releases in the wild which recently happened.

With a recent release[2] of 1Password for Linux and the 1Password extension, the two can now communicate. Allowing you to use biometrics to unlock the extension and keep it unlocked throughout your browsing sessions.

While this news doesn't unlock this ability right away for yourself (because referencing TouchID I assume means you're a Mac friend). We will be continuing to rollout over the coming months to Windows and Mac.

[1] https://1password.community/discussion/comment/591579/#Comme...

[2] https://1password.community/discussion/119609/1password-for-...

It's a fundamental concern I've always had with subscriptions for non-entertainment services or trivially fungible goods. I've become a big believer in business incentives and feedback loops for sustainable commercial relationships. Individual leadership and culture can stand against them to some extent for a time, but individuals move on and it seems that near inevitably over enough years organizations tend to track and/or drift according to their incentives and impactful feedback. In a traditional software upgrade model, the default is that they get no money unless they can convince people to upgrade each time. They make their money from overcoming that default, and if people choose not to upgrade that's the most core unignorable feedback for a business that something isn't right. It doesn't guarantee responsiveness or good choices, but it forces them to think about it. From a customer perspective, not paying means the status quo, they don't gain anything new but they lose nothing either.

But with subscriptions it gets inverted. Now for the customer failure to keep paying means losing existing functionality and/or having to expend additional resources (money and time) actively moving to something else. So rather then needing to be convinced to give the company more money, it's more that they need to be convinced not to.

There's a real difference between "a customer base that is very happy" and "a customer base that is merely not irritated enough yet to overcome the inherent energy hump and go looking for a new local minima" and I worry the subscription business model makes that easier to ignore. Not that companies can't in principle find out in other ways! They can do detailed customer polling and so on. But that requires active effort and expense by the company so the temptation will always be to ignore it and follow inertia. This doesn't require the slightest bit of active malice, just a break in feedback loops resulting in drift as a company starts pursuing things from its own tunnel vision. They then look and see the money keep pouring in, so what's the problem? The threat eventually becomes that if the energy barrier is overcome and the stampede begins it's too late. It's a shame to see happen to companies I really really like and have great visions that could be even better.

There is a rub to this too however. In a pay to upgrade model you are incentivised to stuff your application with features and also need to support old versions indefinitely if they have network components.

Granted in 1Pssword case, their classic app would not have stopped working without upgrades. And to my knowledge it should also still work? I have since switched to the subscription model but I have used the old paid app years after they have switched models.

Using 1Password 6 standalone app here without issues. Dropbox integration still works, and that's all the "cloud" I need.

Same with me with 1Password 4 on Windows, via Dropbox as well

these days if you choose not to upgrade you often lose support, and for security critical software it seems you want patches... so even if annual or biannual upgrades don't feel like a subscription, they kind of are... just with a longer interval between subscription payments and a slower cadence for feature delivery.

honestly i think these things are more about lock-in or perceived lock-in, or simply not wanting to waste precious time. even though it's actually fairly easy to jump between password managers, it's still a "migration" or another task where when one's time becomes scarce the thrill of a sundry task like redoing one's passwords is overshadowed by the laundry list of things one could do with their time instead. sure, it's nice to tend the garden, but how many other things would you rather spend an afternoon on that either develop skills, enhance life or recreate in one way or another.

Hi! I work for 1Password. We have this functionality available in beta with our 1Password for Linux app. It will be available on Mac and Windows in the not-too-distant future, though I can't say more specifically when that will be.

[1] https://1password.community/discussion/comment/591579/#Comme...

Can you explain why this was removed, and why it was re-introduced on a platform other than OS X (given that biometric identifiers have become standard in Apple hardware)?

To elaborate on what my colleague, Ben, said, we have been in the process moving to more common cross platform code.

A it more than a year ago we had

- 1Password for Mac and iOS written in Objective-C and Swift - 1Password for Android, written in Java - 1Password for Windows, written in C# - 1Password CLI, written in Go - 1Password web-app, in Typescript - Browser extension in Typescript

Introducing new features was an ever more difficult task. Even getting the behavior of things like password strength meters or generators behaving the same across these platforms was increasingly difficult. (Hint, they didn’t behave the same.)

So we have been taking the time to develop a common core of code that can be used everywhere. And this does take time. Writing the common modules is often relatively easy, but we have to get them to work with the platform specific code

Late 2019 was our first successful deployment of any such function, and that was the TOTP calculator. It was largely transparent to users, except for settling on which sorts of TOTP “quirks” we were going to follow. (TOTP standards are a mess, and different Authenticator apps deal with special cases differently. At least 1Password is now fully consistent with itself)

Over the past year, we’ve been plugging more such things into the apps. And it allows us to fix bugs more quickly as well ashen they are in the common code.

1Paaword for Linux is built on all the new/common code. So while it doesn’t have everything that the others do, it is also where you will see the née stuff that is coming.

This has been a huge effort, and the transition has some rough spots, but once we get there we will be able to move much more quickly in developing and refining features and behaviors.

This is an excellent answer, thanks.

Reading between the lines a bit - biometric authentication was deprecated (from ‘for Mac’) as it was broken or at risk of breaking, and further dev on legacy code was moot due to the transition?

Close: 1Password for Mac itself can still unlock using Touch ID on supported systems, it is just the integration between 1Password for Mac and the 1Password browser extension that is currently lacking. It is possible to use the 1Password Classic extension in order to have that functionality, but we're defaulting to the former now as there are so many other improvements you lose out on otherwise.

It was removed because we needed to change directions on development and continuing to maintain it as well as build out the new implementation was untenable. It came out on Linux first because the Linux app was developed with it in mind, whereas on other platforms we were re-working existing systems to integrate with it. The former materialized quicker.

- Ben, 1Password

Yeah, definitely taking them longer to get this back than they’d planned. Fortunately the ‘classic’ extension for chrome still exists and works.

Link: https://support.1password.com/cs/1password-classic-extension...

I prefer the above classic extensions for switching between Chrome, Safari, Firefox and Edge all day and not having to sign in more than once. Plus the better desktop app integration, including the ability to opt-out of cloud storage of passwords.

I use Touch ID to unlock 1P in Safari regularly every day. What are you saying isn't working?

Did you ever look at a password manager like saas pass that does not need a desktop app and the browser extension is a full blown app that is protected by 2fa?