On WLAN Sync in 1Password 7

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Comments

  • scott_savarese
    scott_savarese
    Community Member

    @brenty, that is a bit unfair I think... It seems that everything is a bad user experience compared to your cloud. Although team members have said the decision isn't final, this thread has gone on for 4 months and there hasn't been any changes with sync. It really does sound like this was a marketing decision designed to steer usage to your cloud offering and not a technical hurdle. People have offered you money, they've offered to be testers for a new sync feature, so I ask all team members... What will it take to get you to add a sync feature that doesn't involve a cloud? I'd love to hear from your senior leadership about this in this thread. How many users have signed up to the mailing list for this (when are you planning on sending a message to it, btw?) Do you folks discuss this at all outside of these forums in team meetings? Have you done anything internally about it? Tested some ideas internally?

    Personally, I'd love to see some of the development builds you've put together that include sync features and help beta test them. I'd love if you re-added Webdav support so that we users can run performance testing for you and let you know if it is really that slow. I know you've said it performs poorly, but that was a while ago.

  • AGAlumB
    AGAlumB
    1Password Alumni

    @brenty, that is a bit unfair I think... It seems that everything is a bad user experience compared to your cloud.

    @scott_savarese: Nope. I wouldn't call Dropbox or iCloud a bad user experience. Otherwise I wouldn't still use them. 1Password.com is the best user experience for 1Password. We get a lot of feedback from people who do and don't like it, for many different reasons. But I haven't seen anyone who's tried it claim that 1Password.com is not a good user experience, even those that don't want it. It generally just comes down to a matter of preference.

    Although team members have said the decision isn't final, this thread has gone on for 4 months and there hasn't been any changes with sync.

    We've had features requested for much longer than 4 months. Still plenty of those open. 1Password.com is a result of many long-time requests though, both directly and indirectly. We've got no shortage of stuff to work on while we're not working on local sync.

    It really does sound like this was a marketing decision designed to steer usage to your cloud offering and not a technical hurdle. People have offered you money, they've offered to be testers for a new sync feature, so I ask all team members...

    I can definitely appreciate this perspective if you haven't actually used 1Password 7. We're really proud of the shape it's in, but it isn't "done"; there are still many other features and improvements we need to work on that we're prioritizing because they can help many more people than local sync would. Offering us money and beta testers doesn't change the realities of software development: if we decided today to do this, a lot of work would still need to be done long before money and beta testers could make any kind of difference.

    What will it take to get you to add a sync feature that doesn't involve a cloud? I'd love to hear from your senior leadership about this in this thread.

    Dave already weighed in earlier.

    How many users have signed up to the mailing list for this (when are you planning on sending a message to it, btw?) Do you folks discuss this at all outside of these forums in team meetings? Have you done anything internally about it? Tested some ideas internally?

    It's definitely something we discuss internally. Goldberg already touched on this, but we're not going to release numbers for the reasons he mentioned. I'll just say that it's far less than I personally expected, and, I'm fairly confident in saying that it's far less than you'd hope as well, given your interest.

    Personally, I'd love to see some of the development builds you've put together that include sync features and help beta test them. I'd love if you re-added Webdav support so that we users can run performance testing for you and let you know if it is really that slow. I know you've said it performs poorly, but that was a while ago.

    A lot of work would need to be done before it would even be possible to have something for people to test, so it's definitely not something we can offer when a decision hasn't been made to pursue this. We have no plans to revisit WebDav though, or release what we worked on in the past. I'm not sure that even exists anymore.

  • UanPassw0rd
    UanPassw0rd
    Community Member
    edited July 2018

    @brenty :

    It's definitely something we discuss internally. Goldberg already touched on this, but we're not going to release numbers for the reasons he mentioned. I'll just say that it's far less than I personally expected, and, I'm fairly confident in saying that it's far less than you'd hope as well, given your interest.

    It’s far less because people outside the forum don’t even know that you need their input to decide on offline sync option. I have a suggestion. Do a Twitter poll:

    Do you want an offline syncing option in 1Passwrod 7 (Windows)?

    • Yes
    • No

    Then let’s see how many votes you have on the yes side.

  • Malachit
    Malachit
    Community Member

    Dear @UanPassw0rd ,

    than an old guy like me has to make a twitter accout to vote for it :) :)
    But I would do it to support!
    If we are invited by mail and any other communication platform to know when and where to vote!

  • AGAlumB
    AGAlumB
    1Password Alumni

    I'm not convinced of the efficacy of Twitter polls. There are a lot of trolls out there. Present company excluded, hopefully. And I'd hate for people to have to sign up for that for this purpose. The newsletter — and this forum — are ad-free and we don't sell people's email addresses.

    And as Goldberg mention already, even if newsletter signups were off by a factor of hundreds, that still doesn't bring the number anywhere near even 1% of 1Password users. :(

  • kermit4karate
    kermit4karate
    Community Member

    @UanPassw0rd Whoa, whoa, whoa, you're being way too logical. ;) The company clearly doesn't want to effectively broadcast the differences between cloud and local because it might upend their business model. This forum's obscurity provides them with a false sense of security in the soundness of their decisions, whereas a more effective means of outreach might actually force them to change their assumptions.

    @brenty :

    It's definitely something we discuss internally. Goldberg already touched on this, but we're not going to release numbers for the reasons he mentioned. I'll just say that it's far less than I personally expected, and, I'm fairly confident in saying that it's far less than you'd hope as well, given your interest.

    It’s far less because people outside the forum don’t even know that you need their input to decide on offline sync option. I have a suggestion. Do a Twitter poll:

    Do you want an offline syncing option in 1Passwrod 7 (Windows)?

    Yes
    No
    Then let’s see how many votes you have on the yes side.

  • AGAlumB
    AGAlumB
    1Password Alumni

    Far from obscuring this, we've discussed it in the Windows beta forum, moved the discussion to this main Windows forum when version 7 reached stable release, had exchanges about it on our blog and social media, and we also include the newsletter link in the WLAN guide on our support site:

    How to use the WLAN server

    "Obscure" would be if we didn't offer this venue for discussion in the first place, and we've continued to make it more prominent over time, in spite of the low interest we've seen overall from our customers, for years now.

  • kermit4karate
    kermit4karate
    Community Member

    "Obscure" would be if we didn't offer this venue for discussion in the first place, and we've continued to make it more prominent over time, in spite of the low interest we've seen overall from our customers, for years now.

    @brenty Obscure is being reactive to feedback buried in nooks and crannies on a user forum. Proactive would be something like reaching out to your customers, like by sending out an email, instead of waiting for them to find you. What are the company's usage statistics for this forum anyway? I doubt it's very high. What percentage of AgileBits customers actively peruse these conversations? 2% Maybe 5%? This thread isn't even sticky, is it?

    I've repeatedly suggested that the company send out an email outlining the differences and pros/cons of a local sync option alongside the new default cloud sync to solicit meaningful feedback, and the reasons given for not being able to do it ring hollow. You could figure it out if you tried. Other users have made other proactive suggestions, too.

    I think this forum precisely meets the standard of "obscure." You guys are trying to appear like you care what people have to say about WLAN sync and local sync in general, but your actions say otherwise.

  • jpgoldberg
    jpgoldberg
    1Password Alumni

    I've repeatedly suggested that the company send out an email outlining the differences and pros/cons of a local sync option alongside the new default cloud sync to solicit meaningful feedback,

    Which features should we be mailing millions of people about

    If the email you received like that were only about the particular changes that you cared about, I'm sure you would be fine with that. But we are not going to send out an email to more than 10 million people (assuming we had their email addresses) every time we suspect that some of them may dislike a change in the features.

    Remember, there are features that you may not care or even know about that others do:

    • We had no idea whether there would be pushback against our dropping of Top View in 1Password for Mac 7. (There wasn't, but we had no way to know before hand how many people used it and how much they cared about it.)
    • The changes in the way Mini/Helper maintains state affect people's workflows and muscle memory. We knew that that would take some adjustment, but we had no way of gauging at the reaction until it had occurred.
    • We dropped SGX usage in 1Password 7 for Windows.

    That is just three of probably a couple of dozen changes that might upset people made only within the last few months. That would be a lot of email to lots of people for whom the email is entirely irrelevant.

    WLAN is different

    Now we did anticipate that there would be more objections to us not bringing WLAN sync to 1Password 7. And so we did set up that sign up list, while we didn't set up lists for other changes. But even though we anticipated objections, we didn't know if that meant from a larger number of people, or from a smaller number of very passionate people. We did notice that the list was getting far fewer signups than expected. So we promoted it more, even, as Brenty pointed out, adding it our WLAN sync documents.

    Size isn't everything

    If we had wanted deliberately undercount demand, we would have. But we didn't. We want to get good sense of what the demand was and why. Now we know that only a small portion of people who care about the issue are going to hit that sign up and be counted page, but that isn't be design; it is just how these things work. So what should our multiplier be? When we first set it up, we were batting around a multiplier of 100. That is we figured that for every person who signs up, there are 99 more people who feel the same way. But when we saw how few were signing up, we switched to a multiplier of 500 for our guess work.

    Now we do not decide on features based on a popularity contest. For example we make sure that 1Password works for blind people, even though they probably a tiny portion of our customers. And we do not insist that each feature pays for itself. We have security features that probably lose us customers (like having to manage and not lose the Secret Key) because it is the right thing to do to ensure that we (and thus anyone who compromises us) have zero capacity to decrypt your data. (This is a big security distinguisher making 1Password enormously safer than competing products, but it does not turn into sales as much as we like, and it adds confusion and friction during signup.)

    So that is why we also asked people people to give us their reasons for wanting WLAN. Perhaps there were reasons for it that we hadn't considered or had failed to understand. This is why so much of the early part of this discussion thread has involved me trying to get a better grasp of people's reasons.1 The point is that it isn't just about numbers. If demand had been much higher than we'd expected, that might have played a role. But if it was at or below the level we'd guessed, then we still need to consider the real value of it to those who wanted it (and to those who didn't know that they should want it.)

    So even if we end up with a smaller sample of people wanting this feature, it is still going to be large enough that we aren't going to miss any reasons.

    And we don't have the relevant email addresses

    We don't email people unless they have signed up for a newsletter. There are a lot of people on our mail newsletter list, but we limit email to that to conform to what people wanted to sign up for. That's how we keep people on the list. We do have email addresses of those who have signed up for 1Password.com, but I think you will agree that even if we were to mail them asking about WLAN sync, it really is the wrong population. If you purchased a license directly from us over the years, we only have a hash of your email instead of your email itself. That way, we can look things up by email addresses, but we can't misuse those.

    I probably should have led with this point. We really couldn't have emailed the relevant people even if we'd wanted to. That, of course, is a consequence of the steps we take to preserve user privacy.


    1. I have to confess to no longer reading everything now, as I do not feel that there is much chance of me learning anything new from it. This is not the fault of people posting as nobody can be expected to read the whole thing to see if what they are saying has already been said and responded to, but it is a consequence of the nature of the medium. ↩︎

  • kermit4karate
    kermit4karate
    Community Member
    edited July 2018

    Now we know that only a small portion of people who care about the issue are going to hit that sign up and be counted page, but that isn't be design; it is just how these things work. So what should our multiplier be? When we first set it up, we were batting around a multiplier of 100. That is we figured that for every person who signs up, there are 99 more people who feel the same way. But when we saw how few were signing up, we switched to a multiplier of 500 for our guess work.

    @jpgoldberg So you acknowledge knowing that dropping WLAN sync would warrant at least some level of effort on the company's part to elicit feedback, as evident by the decision to create an obscure signup and allow this thread to exist without closing it or blocking accounts (gee, thanks), but the company didn't care enough to develop a methodology more accurate than arbitrarily assigning a seemingly random multiplier of 100 -- no, 500 (?) -- to the feedback you receive?

    Can I ask why the multiplier was pegged at 500? Why not 5,527?? Or 10,263? LOL.

    As for sending an email...I'm wondering why, if it's OK to extrapolate the actual interest based on such an unreliably small sample size that it warrants a 500:1 multiplier, wouldn't it also be OK to send an email to a subset of the total user base? Like, the people for whom you have an email address?

  • jpgoldberg
    jpgoldberg
    1Password Alumni
    edited July 2018

    I can not justify the multiplier of 500. It might be 50, it might be 1000. We have to guess. I really can’t imagine it being much larger, as anyone who has finds themselves looking for this in 1Password has a fair chance of searching for an answer. And a search is likely to turn up this discussion or our support document. I think my 500 is very generous.

    I suppose we could randomly sample our user base (if we had the email addresses). That’s an interesting idea. I’m not sure that I would want to do that with our main newsletter list with people having been made aware of that on signup, but sampling is a reasonable approach.

    It is fair to say that market research is not our strong suit. We honestly had not thought about sampling at all.

  • UanPassw0rd
    UanPassw0rd
    Community Member
    edited July 2018

    @jpgoldberg we are again going into the wrong arguments.

    The point is not that you should be emailing your entire user base. My whole point is...nobody from the actual users who would be interested in the feature will specifically visit the forum...find this discussion. Find the email subscription...and take the time from their busy schedule to subscribe...and confirm from their email that they want to subscribe.....nobody will do that.....so no wonder you don't have meny people subscribed. (And please do not try to convince me that many people will visit the link on: "How to use the WLAN server"...will see the last sentence and will subscribe.....I still consider this obfuscated).

    Second. There is a reason I suggested, "Any offline syncing option" and not just WLAN sync. Because I am fairly certain that people will not care if it is something else as long as there is such an option. (this is to help you guys since you said WLAN sync is extremely complicated to implement and support.....ok...just give me a way to sync offline....).

    Third. You guys have more than 100k followers on Twitter. (If people do not have it use all of the social media accounts you have Facebook etc. at the same time...or use another solution if you want). You cannot argue with me that that if you ask Twitter and Facebook about offline syncing option you will get more combined imput than the forum or whoever got to: support.1password.com/wlan-server/?windows.

    I understand you guys...this will interfere with the subscription model. It is not as if I do not want you to make money. I do... (if you don't and I wake up one day and there is no 1Password because there was no sustainable way to develop it i lose as much you do..).

    I remember that you said that Apple does not allow you to implement file sync like the one android does so we can exchange passwords. I am not an expert but I know that iTunes allows files to be exchanged with apps (such as VLC etc). Isn't there a way for you to use this feature and exchange vaults...I am just trying to help..

    Finally, I would agree with you that yes...this feature will be implemented because you have decided to do the right thing and not because there is a popular demand for it. It is like human rights or charity...So...I am just begging you...Do the right thing.

  • AGAlumB
    AGAlumB
    1Password Alumni

    My whole point is...nobody from the actual users who would be interested in the feature will specifically visit the forum...find this discussion.

    @UanPassw0rd: That's simply not the case. The thing that you and Kermit here are missing is that customers who contact us are self-selecting for the ones who have issues: literally anyone who installs 1Password 7 on Windows who cares about local sync will immediately see that it isn't there. So arguing about specific numbers/multipliers is missing the point. When we released version 6 without local vault support, people who cared about local vaults contacted us to 1) ask if it was simply hidden somewhere and 2) let us know they wanted that feature if it wasn't. 1Password users are smarter than you give them credit. They notice. Do you really think there are people out there who want local sync but think they're syncing locally when they're not really not?

    It may be that we end up doing a local sync feature in the future, perhaps something entirely different from WLAN Server. I can't say because I don't know, and I can't predict the future. But one thing I can say for certain is that this is not a human rights or charity issue.

  • kermit4karate
    kermit4karate
    Community Member
    edited July 2018

    When we released version 6 without local vault support, people who cared about local vaults contacted us to 1) ask if it was simply hidden somewhere and 2) let us know they wanted that feature if it wasn't. 1Password users are smarter than you give them credit. They notice. Do you really think there are people out there who want local sync but think they're syncing locally when they're not really not?

    @brenty I think passively waiting for an as-yet unknown # of people to upgrade to the new Windows version only to find that WLAN sync, which is so obviously important to at least some of your users (more than you think, since your methodology for identifying the true # of them out there is laughable), no longer exists, is a [inappropriate language removed] way to run a business, but it's not altogether unusual nowadays. It's just a lot less customer-centric than proactively approaching your current customers beforehand.

    Despite you guys repeatedly dangling the possibility of someday maybe perhaps adding (back) a local sync option in the future, like it's a carrot designed to maybe possibly hopefully encourage reluctant users to "stick it out" and get used to cloud sync anyway...it's quite obvious to anyone reading this thread that your intentions are to stick to the cloud-first/only model.

  • AGAlumB
    AGAlumB
    1Password Alumni

    @kermit4karate: To be clear, no one is asking you to "stick it out". You already (I thought) made it clear that you'd moved on. Also, potty language and trolling with snide remarks and insults is not welcome here. Please keep that in mind in the future. We're happy to have you here, so long as you adhere to the guidelines:

    Forum guidelines

    If you have something more to contribute to the discussion I hope you will do so. Just understand that someone can care about what you have to say without agreeing with you and doing whatever you want. I think that's really the only way to get along in this world, as everyone is different and isn't necessarily going to have opinions and actions that align with your personal preferences.

    At the end of the day, it's easy for you to say we should spam millions of people with whom you have no relationship when it suits you. We're not going to do that to our our customers, 99% of whom don't care about local sync, just to satisfy that (never mind that doing such a thing would get us flagged by many email providers and spam filtering services). We're going to maintain the same standards in that regard that we always have, not just because it's a smart thing to do, business-wise, but because it's the right thing to do ethically. You may dispute the 99% figure, but if it was less than that we'd be getting a lot more feedback about this, not just here in the forum but via email and social media as well. As I mentioned earlier, 1Password users on Windows who care about local sync are very aware of the absence of this feature. They know how to contact us, and have never been shy about doing so. That's why the app supports local vaults today: because a lot of people told us they needed this feature and we listened.

  • scott_savarese
    scott_savarese
    Community Member
    edited July 2018

    OK, so we're still going round and round about this... How about taking this another way? Instead of talking about syncing, lets talk about creating a modular structure in 1password that would allow us to do this. The one requirement is that the stuff handed to the module is already encrypted. We trust your encryption. We believe that your encryption methodologies are sound. We just want access to the database so we can move it between the devices. You encrypt it and we'll be on the hook for a module that will efficiently copy it around.

    Is that an easier ask for you? I understand that there might be a security implication, but if we build this as a hook with predefined functions (something for menu item text so we can call it, and a function that does the work) we can make it so that this unsecure code only gets run at a set time with data that is pre-encrypted for it.

    My only question is how do we get it to work on IOS where things are sandboxed? Is that solvable?

  • AGAlumB
    AGAlumB
    1Password Alumni

    @scott_savarese: What you're asking for is essentially how 1Password works: it encrypts the data and writes it to disk, where it can be easily copied. There's never been a computer-to-computer local sync option, so some folks use this in conjunction with rsync and similar tools. But yeah, iOS is another story altogether. As far as I know, there's not a supported way to automate reading/writing files outside an app's sandbox; only "sharing" is possible, and that's very much one way. In every other case — macOS, Windows, Android — syncing with an arbitrary folder is possible. Just not iOS.

  • UanPassw0rd
    UanPassw0rd
    Community Member
    edited July 2018

    @brenty 1Password users are smarter than you give them credit. They notice. Do you really think there are people out there who want local sync but think they're syncing locally when they're not really not?

    That was not at all my point..... My point is not that they are stupid and they will not see that the feature is missing. My point is that they have things to do instead of complaining about it. There are people out there (and I know some of them) who want this feature...know that this feature is missing from 1Psw.7, waited some time to see if it will be implemented and then simply did not want to argue, and now use Dropbox. (at the same time they did not want to stay to 1P4 since it the older design has many problems)

    You can say that many many people do not want this feature as much as I do. I agree…but do not say that you know they do not want it……because they did not complain about it……really??

    It is not that they are happy with it. It is that it takes efforts and time to argue about it, to request it, to show that they are not happy, to subscribe to the newsletter, to even find that such exists. My point is that you cannot expect to understand the full grasp of your clients’ agenda by simply leaving it to the forum to be a big enough platform for their concerns and leaving it for them to complain. A much better job needs to be done promoting the issue in the easiest possible way for people to voice their opinion. This is why I suggested Twitter or Facebook...and not just saying...we have created the newsletter, there is the forum....so we did enough to see the full picture. It is not enough.

    I understand you. I am trying to understand how hard your job is. I am trying to understand that you do not want to take a lot of your time to gather as much knowledge as possible to know for how many people is this really important. Only to then spend more time developing something that not everyone will take advantage of while at the same time being asked for 300 other things that are not yet developed.

    Just...try to understand my point of view as well...I have paid for a product with a vital feature missing and instead of just giving up on it and use Dropbox like other people or going to a competitor months ago, I am trying to fight for something I believe is important.

    I am really tired of arguing. It kills me that I have to…

  • AGAlumB
    AGAlumB
    1Password Alumni

    My point is that they have things to do instead of complaining about it. There are people out there (and I know some of them) who want this feature...know that this feature is missing from 1Psw.7, waited some time to see if it will be implemented and then simply did not want to argue, and now use Dropbox. (at the same time they did not want to stay to 1P4 since it the older design has many problems) [...] It is not that they are happy with it. It is that it takes efforts and time to argue about it, to request it, to show that they are not happy, to subscribe to the newsletter, to even find that such exists. My point is that you cannot expect to understand the full grasp of your clients’ agenda by simply leaving it to the forum to be a big enough platform for their concerns and leaving it for them to complain. A much better job needs to be done promoting the issue in the easiest possible way for people to voice their opinion. This is why I suggested Twitter or Facebook...and not just saying...we have created the newsletter, there is the forum....so we did enough to see the full picture. It is not enough.

    @UanPassw0rd: Those are really good points. But even folks who don't necessarily want to take the time to reach out to request/complain/argue/etc. can go to our support site to look for help with WLAN Server:

    How to use the WLAN server

    I'm the same way: I prefer to look for the information I need rather than emailing, etc. if I can help it. That's why we wanted to make this more discoverable: some people are into "self help", DIY, etc. And they too can sign up for the newsletter so that they're not only counted, but so they'll get any updates on this if and when we've made a final determination.

    But I disagree with the idea of "promotion". We don't promote the myriad other features some 1Password does not have. That's a long list, and most of our customers would be rightly baffled as to why we'd do something like that (and we like to keep our options open where we can). Some would feel somewhat vindicated I guess, when we acknowledged that their pet feature request continues to go unfulfilled, but mostly it would just make people upset because it would essentially be rubbing their face in the fact that 1Password doesn't do everything they want it to. I'm not sure that would actually serve to benefit anybody. So I do think that having the information available to those who want it is best.

    I understand you. I am trying to understand how hard your job is. I am trying to understand that you do not want to take a lot of your time to gather as much knowledge as possible to know for how many people is this really important. Only to then spend more time developing something that not everyone will take advantage of while at the same time being asked for 300 other things that are not yet developed.

    I really appreciate that. We absolutely don't mind taking the time to read everyone's comments and reply here. But you're right that we're hesitant (to say the least) to spend a lot of time developing, testing, and supporting a feature that few would use. I know that it would make the da of you and others who've demonstrated their desire for this, whether by commenting here in the forum, sending messages via another medium, or simply signing up for the newsletter. I would LOVE to get to turn around and say that we're doing it, offer a public beta, and hear from folks like you when it launched and made your day/week/month/etc. But at the same time it would be a huge bummer when the greater 1Password userbase didn't care about something we worked hard on (which is inevitable even with more popular features), and worse when we heard from all the people who tried to use it but found it frustrating (to say the least). That's how I used to spend a lot of my time, and while I always love helping people with 1Password, this is one area where there has been a lot of pain because we had this feature. That's not just frustrating for me, but more importantly (I get paid, after all), for our customers. And ultimately it isn't something we can justify working on at this time for many other reasons as well. A lot of people who be upset that we worked on this instead of [insert feature request here], so we'd also end up needing to justify it to other customers too. Sort of a lose-lose.

    Just...try to understand my point of view as well...I have paid for a product with a vital feature missing and instead of just giving up on it and use Dropbox like other people or going to a competitor months ago, I am trying to fight for something I believe is important. I am really tired of arguing. It kills me that I have to…

    I'll just say it. That sucks. I feel your pain. I was one of the people super excited about WebDAV back in the day. That's probably why I'm no quick to say "not ever" today: I wish we'd never tried to do WebDAV, because it was a huge letdown for everyone. Similarly, not having WLAN Server now hurts more for you because you had it in the first place. People say "it's better to have loved and lost than to never have loved at all", but I think that's only true because heartbreak is inevitable in human relationships. (Okay, I know this is a stretch.) When it comes to technology, getting functionality and then losing it is, I think, worse than never having it in the first place. I could list a ton of other examples of things that got me excited yet turned out to be a letdown, but that's a whole nother can of worms. So part of me wishes we'd never done WLAN Server...but not doing it was unthinkable when it was the only viable option. Nobody wants to spend their evenings on their computer re-entering all the stuff they saved on their phone during the day. I guess the question is, if WLAN Server never existed, would you have used Dropbox when that came along? I'd like to think so, since the data is encrypted after all, but maybe you'd have been willing to "sync" by hand. I don't know. It's not really an answerable question anyway, since that's not how things played out.

    I don't want to argue either, but I do think that it's essential for us to backup our decisions where we can. If we couldn't, well, then why aren't we building this? I do think we have good reasons, but I know that's no real consolation to you, even if you can understand our perspective. So I'm glad you and others take the time to argue for your "side" as well. I wish there weren't sides, but we have to be opinionated and calculating about these things or we'd ruin 1Password trying to satisfy everyone. I don't really think this comes down right and wrong at this point, but if we were dead wrong about the demand/need for WLAN Server, the only way we'd know it is through exchanges like this. A Twitter poll tells us how many people care enough to click/tap on a poll in their timeline, but gives us no insight into the reasons. And we really needed to be sure we understand those. I think we do at this point, but it wasn't a certainty. Otherwise Goldberg wouldn't have opened this discussion — none of us would have — and we'd have assumed we had a handle on it and gotten surprised when you folks brought it up yourselves. Sometimes we're surprised by the ways that people use 1Password, but this is one we have a long history with ourselves. I'm sorry that it's not something we can reasonably accommodate in the new Windows app currently, and I don't personally have much hope that will change. :(

  • blubb
    blubb
    Community Member

    Hello,

    everyone wants to have wlan server! only agilebits do not want him ... so why give this thread here? People want to decide, with what they sync! Not everyone wants to put their data on the Internet! so true!

    The customer is king and not the king is a customer :-)

  • Lars
    Lars
    1Password Alumni

    Welcome to the forum, @blubb! Thanks for taking the time to share your views on this. Indeed, we have a number of passionate advocates for WLAN sync here in this thread and elsewhere. And when people are kind enough to write at greater length to explain their reasoning, a few of these can wind up looking like an "overwhelming" support for something (or opposition to it). But 1Password's user base is in the millions now, and any decision we make has to be weighed against both how many people it will affect and how many people want such a thing. Building a WLAN sync server isn't a trivial matter. The last time we had one in 1Password for Windows was in version 4. Because of the code-base used in 1Password 4 for Windows, we could not update it to the newer version with full compatibility with Windows 10, so we literally wrote 1Password 6 for Windows as a complete re-write. In that version, we concentrated on compatibility with 1password.com accounts, because the existing version 4 still worked fine for standalone accounts.

    But when it came time to add local vault support back into 1Password 7 for Windows, a lot of choices had to be made -- this was the first time ever on Windows that we would have an app capable of both standalone and 1password.com support. We wondered what the support was for WLAN sync, and whether it was worth it for us to spend the developer time creating it, knowing that doing so would mean that other priorities and features would be either shelved or delayed by doing so. That's why you see this thread, and the newsletter sign up. If you haven't already signed up for the WLAN sync newsletter so your voice is officially counted, I'd urge you to do so now. You can sign up at this link, so you'll be among the first to know any new developments and what our eventual decision is.

  • kermit4karate
    kermit4karate
    Community Member

    @UanPassw0rd Bravo. Your point here about WLAN sync missing from 1Password7 for Windows cannot be overstated. This sums everything up about this entire lengthy thread:

    You can say that many many people do not want this feature as much as I do. I agree…but do not say that you know they do not want it……because they did not complain about it……really??

    It is not that they are happy with it. It is that it takes efforts and time to argue about it, to request it, to show that they are not happy, to subscribe to the newsletter, to even find that such exists. My point is that you cannot expect to understand the full grasp of your clients’ agenda by simply leaving it to the forum to be a big enough platform for their concerns and leaving it for them to complain. A much better job needs to be done promoting the issue in the easiest possible way for people to voice their opinion. This is why I suggested Twitter or Facebook...and not just saying...we have created the newsletter, there is the forum....so we did enough to see the full picture. It is not enough.

  • AGAlumB
    AGAlumB
    1Password Alumni

    Indeed, I thought that was well-put. :)

  • letoir
    letoir
    Community Member
    edited July 2018

    Guys, we need this functionality to be able to upgrade to Version 7 of 1password.
    Specially had to make an account to be able to post this over here.
    I think if you can confirm that 1pass doesn't care about us, because we don't bring that monthly cashflow. If this is the case, then I would suggest people to find an alternative like keypass, because they do import the 1pass format file.
    It hurts to say this, I want to stay loyal to you guys, but don't push me to leave, because once I am gone, I will stay away no mather how green it is over here, I chose my grass.

    link : https://keepass.info/help/base/importexport.html#imp_1pwpro

  • AGAlumB
    AGAlumB
    1Password Alumni

    @letoir: No customers who purchase licenses give us recurring revenue, but we added support for local vaults. It was something we could do because there's still critical mass of people who want to use local vaults with 3rd party sync methods. WLAN Server is a much more niche feature than local vaults overall unfortunately. There are a lot of other options, both supported in 1Password today as well as competition from others. I personally think that our offerings offer the best combination of security, convenience, and usability, but if there's something else out there that you prefer I wouldn't want to discourage you from using that. Life is too short to be unhappy because of software. :(

  • letoir
    letoir
    Community Member

    @brenty shame on ur comment, daring to put it on us, the customer. As we love 1password, using it for ages... you dont understand our need. We dont want to keep our data onservers! Whats so difficult to understand about it.

  • UanPassw0rd
    UanPassw0rd
    Community Member

    @brenty : Similarly, not having WLAN Server now hurts more for you because you had it in the first place. People say "it's better to have loved and lost than to never have loved at all", but I think that's only true because heartbreak is inevitable in human relationships.

    Thank you for the answer. I just want to stress again. I am not married to the WLAN server idea. Any solution that you can come up with that will allow me to sync offline with IOS I would be happy with. (and yes I am aware of their restrictions that make your job very hard)

  • Searchlight
    Searchlight
    Community Member

    I would like to backup UanPassw0rd‘s vote - any form of local sync between Windows and iOS would be welcome and would let me upgrade to 1P 7 on my Windows and Mac Computers. It doesn‘t have to be the WLAN server if Agilebits doesn‘t like this feature. Take a look at KeePass - one of the iOS clients presents itself as a server and you can exchange files with this server (I don‘t want to take the word WebDAV into my mouth...). This could be a way to sync in the same way as the OS X version syncs to folders - expose the iOS device as a folder via VLAN and sync the database to it.

    But after reading all the answers here - Agilebits rather likes to force us for using the cloud. I would assume that the next features that will vanish are WLAN sync on the OS X version, followed by the Dropbox- and iCloud-sync and last but not least again the ability to create local vaults.

  • AGAlumB
    AGAlumB
    1Password Alumni

    @Searchlight: If we were going to "force" people into "the cloud", we wouldn't be having this conversation; we would have simply announced that 1Password.com was the only way to use 1Password going forward years ago. And there wouldn't be thousands of people using 1Password with licenses and local vaults today. We also don't have plans to spend the time and effort removing support for sync with 3rd party cloud providers and WLAN Server from the three apps that support them already. People are using those (myself included), and it's much less trouble across the board to leave it as-is.

  • AGAlumB
    AGAlumB
    1Password Alumni

    @brenty shame on ur comment, daring to put it on us, the customer.

    @letoir: What are you talking about?

    As we love 1password, using it for ages... you dont understand our need. We dont want to keep our data onservers! Whats so difficult to understand about it.

    It seems like you're either not reading what I wrote or you're taking something out of context. I definitely do understand that, but I can't offer you something that doesn't exist.

This discussion has been closed.