It's time to get rid of 1Password

350 words, 2 minutes.

1Password is a good password manager, relatively speaking. But I’ve got rid of it, and this is why.

I’ve lost track of the years I’ve been using 1Password for. It was a great password manager, and there’s been little controversy attached to it, unlike the competition. Managing passwords in a central place always felt like anathema to me, but needs must, and my former solution — a gpg encrypted text file 😂 — wasn’t going to cut it with the wife.

Their original implementation, of an encrypted file simply shared via iCloud, felt less yucky than a subscription cloud service, and I was one of the many who grumbled when they forced users down their own cloud storage route.

Since then, the service has steadily worsened as it’s grown with lots of needless functionality. And there’s an obvious reason why.

VC-induced enshittifcation.

$620 million! Good grief. How they’ve managed to sell the idea that managing passwords is worth 6.8B is beyond me.

What scares me most about that level of investment though, is the VCs will put metaphorical thumb screws on the business at some point. It always happens, without fail.¹ With that pressure will come mistakes. So as much as I’ve trusted 1Password to date, and there is no evidence to say they will cock up, I’m not willing to take the chance.

With the breaking out of Apple’s own password store — keychain — to a separate app, and family sharing functionality, it’s finally a good enough solution to just let the OS be a password manager.

If you want to move away, and just use Apple’s password manager, Jamie Zawinski has a post about migrating. It’s not hard. I chose to overlap my use for most of this year, simply saving passwords as I used them. It’s been a great way to clear out a lot of dead wood.