[al_borland]

There is a lot to be said for staying small and doing one thing really, really well. Any time a service I like tries to expand their business, usually to appease investors, that's when things start to go downhill and I start looking for alternatives.

[postalcoder]

> There is a lot to be said for staying small and doing one thing really, really well.

Man. 1Password is another example of this. They've chased growth and no longer seem to be able to build a browser extension that actually works. I've been seriously considering dropping 1PW because of it.

[al_borland]

Funny you bring it up. I was a 1Password user for 18 years and just migrated off it last month when they announced the price hike. It has only been working 50% of the time, and the lack of a reliable auto-fill is a security risk… yet they are raising the price so all their Avenger backers can get a return on their investment. A bunch of movie stars investing in a password manager feels like a huge red flag to me.

I ended up moving to Apple passwords. I really wanted to keep my password manager platform agnostic, but if I’m being a realist, all my stuff is from Apple, they have a history of long-term support, and so far it’s worked great on all the sites 1Password struggled with. There are features I miss, and I did need to manually validate each imported entry and do some manual cleanup, but I was able to transition relatively quickly with a DB of over 400 accounts.

[postalcoder]

I've been side-eyeing a transition to Apple's password manager and it's helpful to know that you have done so with little pain. I may try it soon.

[al_borland]

I didn’t want to go into too much detail if you were thinking a different route, but since you’re thinking of going with Apple, here are some of the rough edges I remember in the transition.

I exported 1Password to a CSV and imported it into Apple Passwords. I had spend some time cleaning up 1PW first, archiving dead accounts, but the export had everything in a flat file, so I had to go through everything in my archive and delete it from Apple PW.

Custom fields and some other special fields aren’t supported in Apple PW, this is where I had to go through one-by-one and make sure I wasn’t missing anything and add those things to the notes area.

Non-password data in 1PW doesn’t fit well into Apple PW, so I used a password protected Apple Notes file for that. Not ideal, but I didn’t use those things too much. For software registrations, I didn’t bother securing those too much and filed them away as txt files, most were really old anyway.

The CSV export made 2FA pretty obvious, so I could set that up with Apple. I want to say it made passkeys obvious too, but I only had 1 and knew what it was.

I cleaned out Apple Passwords before the import, so it only had app passwords for login-with-Apple. The way they do this leave much to be desired, to the point that I don’t want to use that feature anymore.

After the import I also found that it tried to be smart about handling multiple entries for the same site, or tried to intelligently name stuff based on the website. It got most of this right, but I still needed to clean some things up and do a little investigation to figure out what a few things were and fix them. Some of this was due to importing archived stuff. I did have to go back to 1Password to make sense of some of it.

All-in-all, I did it all over a long weekend. I kept 1PW around for a month to see if I’d need it and I never did.

[postalcoder]

Thank you so much for this!