Feature request: Google Drive sync support

Hi @amonzur,

To be honest, if it was just a matter of dev time, it'd be done by now. If I remember correctly, the permission model of GoogleDrive is such that we have to have the user grant us permission for every file we want access to. 1Password's agilekeychain sync file can have hundreds of files (it's generally 1 file per item). When setting up sync we could ask for permission for all the files, and the user could grant it, and it'd be swell. But when another device adds an item, which adds a file... we don't have access to that file on iOS until we request it from the user. This would quickly become annoying for the user.

One of the benefits of our recent push towards OPVault is that OPVault no longer creates one file per item. This will open up more possibilities, and make things simpler... possibly even getting us to the point where we could consider something like GoogleDrive. OPVault is really cool, and will help us in all sorts of respects.

I hope this helps.

Rick

I'm glad Rick's answer was so informative! Whenever I see a reply from him, I make sure to pay close attention, since I almost always learn something new. :) Sorry if not having that specific answer earlier caused any confusion. I've made sure to save that in my own notes in case I see more questions about this.

Hi @scionwest,

I appreciate the passion with which you're approaching this. I agree that it's unfortunate that 4 years after we said we'd look into it, it hasn't been developed. If I actually thought we'd never do it, I'd close the issues in our tracker, and would simply tell you that it's never happening. Which is what I say whenever someone asks about WebDAV for sync. WebDAV is a bag of hurt.

You're making some assumptions about our app that you really shouldn't be making though. This has nothing to do with coupling issues at all. The closest thing we have to coupling to Dropbox is that we know how their conflict files look like in order to better handle those. Adding the regex to know how other conflict files look like would be trivial.

Our Android app doesn't yet support Google Drive. Everyone here wants to see Google Drive added, but the people on that team more than anyone REALLY want to see it added. That's probably where it'd show up first. On the Mac side (since this is post on the Mac forum), it's really just a folder to us so we're ready whenever (though I'd like to add the support for the conflict files which should be easy).

You mentioned iCloud and the fact that we jumped on it. You're absolutely right, we jumped on that. There's a few reasons for why we did that. iCloud is all about "no fuss sync." Sync is one of the parts of the app that causes us the most customer support (I'm here answering a forum thread about sync right now), and one of the parts that confuses users the most. So the allure of a "just check the box and don't worry about it" sync is HUGE. We can't do that with Dropbox, nor Google Drive, nor WebDAV or much of anything else. The fact that iCloud Sync also limits the sync to within the same AppleID also helps here as it simplifies things. There's no such promises with Dropbox, or Google Drive or anything else where there's the concept of shared folders. iCloud gave us the opportunity to make a nice simple sync that's easy to use and where few things could go wrong. iCloud/CloudKit gave us the opportunity to take that idea and make it significantly better since iCloud/MobileDocuments was far from perfect. In both the cases of iCloud/MobileDocuments and iCloud/CloudKit, development was greatly simplified due to the fact that the OS does a bunch of the work for us. They literally had all of the components we needed out of the gates to make it all happen.

Rick

Thanks for the votes! :)

Is all of this syncing functionality set to be functionally deprecated for most users by the functionality that teams appears to offer?

No, but we're absolutely focused on 1Password Teams/Families right now, and there we have much more control over data availability since we're not dependent on a 3rd party service.

We'd definitely like to revisit this in the future though, since many of us (myself included) still sync data separate from 1Password Teams/Families. So perhaps in the future we'll have the bandwidth to add support for additional sync options, such as Google Drive.

Thanks for the +1! :chuffed:

Thanks for letting us know! :pirate: :+1:

Thank you! I hope we'll be able to grant this wish in the future. :chuffed:

Thanks for letting us know! I'm sorry that 1Password doesn't fulfill your Google Drive requirement right now, but hopefully we'll be able to better meet your needs in the future.

@Lury: I'm really sorry if you feel you've been misled. We try to be clear and not promise things we can't deliver, and where we may have failed in that regard, I apologize. But insults aside (and please, do keep that to yourself in the future), It's really not fair to presume our intentions.

I mean this in two ways: when we say that it's something we'd like to do in the future, we mean it, whether you choose to believe that or not; and also, please remember that you didn't purchase 1Password with the understanding that Google Drive was, is, or would be supported in the future. I don't believe it was said that we "can't" support it, only that it isn't feasible for us right now.

One of the great things about software is that, unlike many other things we spend money on, the thing we paid for gets better over time (unless it's abandoned, which is unfortunately what happens sometimes...) That's really awesome! But to expect that it will do something specific and new in the future that was not promised takes that a step too far. We're going to keep improving 1Password, but we can only do so with the resources we have available, and that means we have to be selective about what we do and when we do it, with a focus on doing the most good for the greatest number of people.

This may all sound like splitting hairs I don't have, but I guess my point is that the view of "I paid for it, so now I expect you to do this other thing" really hurts everyone involved: it hurts you because you want and expect something you cannot have (at least for now); it hurts us because we want to give it to you anyway, but don't have the resources to do so in the time frame you seem to expect it; and it also hurts is in the sense that the work we've already done (which you paid for when you purchased a license) and work we have yet to do in the future (should we tackle cross platform Google Drive syncing) is being taken for granted as well.

Unreasonable expectations aren't good for anyone involved, whether we're taking about marrying someone and hoping they change for us, or making a commitment to something less tangible like a software product based on something it doesn't offer. And these expectations rob us of the joy and wonder we might experience in the future. I sincerely hope that you're using 1Password today because of the many awesome things it can do for you, and we'll continue to do our best to "surprise" you by improving 1Password on the future — perhaps with Google Drive in particular.