Commercial use of 1Password for iOS

Options
benfdc
benfdc
Community Member

Apple’s App Store Terms and Conditions set out a Standard EULA that provides, among other things:

For App Store Products (defined below), end users may be individuals acting in their own capacities, commercial enterprises or educational institutions.

(i) If you are an individual acting in your personal capacity, you may download and sync an App Store Product for personal, noncommercial use on any iOS Device you own or control.

This is a pretty harsh restriction for a product like 1Password (especially now that multiple vault support has been added to the product). The desktop versions of 1Password that are sold from the AgileBits website have no comparable license restriction.

Fortunately, AgileBits can release its users from this constraint if it wishes. Quoting again from the App Store Terms and Conditions:

LICENSED APPLICATION END USER LICENSE AGREEMENT

The Mac App Store Products and App Store Products (collectively, “App Store Product(s)”) made available through the Mac App Store Service and App Store Service (collectively, “App Store Service(s)”) are licensed, not sold, to you. Your license to each App Store Product that you obtain through the App Store Services or associate with your Account is subject to your prior acceptance of this Licensed Application End User License Agreement (“Standard EULA”), and you agree that the terms of this Standard EULA will apply to each App Store Product that you license through the App Store Service, unless that App Store Product is covered by a valid end user license agreement between you and the Application Provider of that App Store Product, in which case the terms of that separate end user license agreement will govern. Your license to any Apple Product under this Standard EULA or separate end user license agreement is granted by Apple, and your license to any Third-Party Product under this Standard EULA or separate end user license agreement is granted by the Application Provider of that Third-Party Product.

Has AgileBits considered offering its App Store customers better terms than Apple’s Standard EULA, at least for the Pro version? (I note that free LastPass accounts are licensed for personal use only, but paid LastPass Premium accounts have no such restriction.)

Also, the App Store Terms and Conditions expressly provide that “Family Sharing is for personal, non-commercial use only.” AgileBits does not impose this restriction on family licenses sold through its website. If you decide to enable Family Sharing on 1P/iOS, it would be great if your EULA expressly authorized commercial use of the product in connection with Family Sharing.

n.b. These same licensing concerns are present with respect to the Mac App Store version of 1Password for Mac.

Comments

  • Hi @benfdc‌

    Thanks for bringing this to our attention.

    “Family Sharing is for personal, non-commercial use only.” AgileBits does not impose this restriction on family licenses sold through its website.

    Not exactly, but we do say that family licenses are only valid for up to 5 family members living under the same roof (e.x. You can't take it to work and share it with 4 of your colleagues). You and your 4 family members can take 1Password to work and use it on your workstations there, as long as you are the only people using 1Password on those computers (or any other individuals using it are appropriately licensed).

    It is not our intention to limit folks from using 1Password at work, regardless of where they purchase from. The one caveat is license sharing. If you want to share a license purchased from us at work, you'd need a business license (available in our business store), with the appropriate number of seats. We would not expect that folks use Family Sharing to share the iOS app with folks who are not their family (not that Family Sharing currently works with IAPs anyway).

    Clearly some further thought and better writing is needed on this, but those are my initial reactions.

    Thanks.

    Ben

  • benfdc
    benfdc
    Community Member
    Options

    @bwoodruff—

    I gather that the new Family Sharing feature does not apply to in-app purchases, so it is not germane to 1Password 5 for iOS and therefore should not have been raised at all in this 1P/iOS forum thread. Sorry about that. (You are of course correct, however, that an AWS Family License is for sharing among members of a household, and not for sharing among business associates.)

    The issue I wish to raise here is that, absent a special EULA, a copy of 1Password for iOS purchased by an individual is licensed strictly for non-commercial use. I suspect that the non-commercial use licensing limitation in the Standard EULA is widely ignored by users, but some of us like to turn square corners!

  • Sorry about that.

    No apologies necessary.

    absent a special EULA

    We do have an EULA published. I'm not sure how "special" it is, but it is there:

    Thanks.

    Ben

  • benfdc
    benfdc
    Community Member
    edited September 2014
    Options

    @bwoodruff—

    The EULA that you link to does not expressly state what versions of 1Password it applies to. However, Section 7 of that EULA makes it pretty clear that the EULA can only apply to purchases from the AgileBits Web Store:

    If you decide You wish to purchase a License, AgileBits requires that You provide us with certain billing information that is personal to You (“Personal Information”). That Personal information includes Your name and address and may also include other information such as Your e-mail address. It does not include your credit card number, which will only be seen by our sales partner, PayPal Inc.

    1Password for iOS cannot be purchased from the AgileBits Web Store, so unless that EULA gets some tweaking it cannot be deemed to supersede the App Store Standard EULA for 1P/iOS.

  • Thanks, @benfdc. I'll bring this up with our Chief Eliminator of Obstacles and see what we can do.

This discussion has been closed.