What are app:// passwords?

NeilFaiman
NeilFaiman
Community Member

As I was doing an audit pass through my vault, I noticed that there are a bunch of password entries for “web sites” like “app://com.apple.iTunes”, “app://com.barebones.bbedit”, “app://org.mozilla.firefox”, even “app://com.apple.KeychainAccess”.

What are these things? How did they get in my vault? (I don’t recall creating them.) What purpose do they serve?


1Password Version: 6.5.3
Extension Version: Not Provided
OS Version: OS X 10.11.6
Sync Type: iCloud

Comments

  • Hi @NeilFaiman,

    That's an excellent question. This turns out to be a bit of a history lesson.

    Those are passwords that you created using the Password Generator while the front-most app on your Mac wasn't 1Password, nor a browser that was running our browser extension. In this case 1Password does two things to the generated password it saves:

    1. It sets it title to be the title of the app you were looking at, so in those examples you'll probably see iTunes, BBEdit, Firefox, Keychain Access.
    2. It associates a URL like you're seeing which consists of app:// + the bundle identifier of the app (which should uniquely identity the app on your system)

    We added this feature into 1Password for Mac years ago with hopes of using these app:// URLs to better bring up the right password if you were to bring up 1Password while looking at that app later. We never did end up building the other half of this feature because we found it difficult to make something good here and explain it to the user.

    We'd still like to do something better for integration with apps on the Mac. I'm not sure that the app:// URLs will be part of the solution, but for now we're leaving them there in case we decide that we do want them. We can easily get rid of them later if we decide that they're definitely not what we want.

    I hope this helps.

    Rick

  • NeilFaiman
    NeilFaiman
    Community Member

    So, it sounds like I can safely delete those passwords, yes?

  • @NeilFaiman : that's difficult for me to say. If you don't know what they belong to then maybe? It's sort of like when you find some old door keys in a drawer.

    Rick

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