How I Tried Leaving 1Password in 2025
1Password also makes a good case for the additional convenience it provides — once setup, all of the authentications, in theory, can be entered by the app. If, by any chance, you cannot access 1Password app or extensions, the web version of the same service still allows you to access all the passwords for easier copy-paste access. The fundamental idea behind 1Password, which I do approve of, is the accessibility to the password manager is the key of its convenience. If using a password manager was hassle, a user is less likely to use the manager.
As I have been using 1Password nearly over a decade, most of my personal documents, IDs, logins, and etc. are stored on 1Password. Not only all of the documents and logins are always available through cloud, I can share them safely as well. What irked me as the years went by is its annual subscription fees: $35.88 per person or $59.88 for family of five. For the family of five, the price per person comes out around at $12 per person, around 1/3 of what personal subscription is currently charging. Due to the very nature of password managers, as far as I know, there isn’t any community effort to “share” their subscriptions. But, nonetheless, password managers, in its purest form, are now bundled with most devices. There are also complementary third-party apps that can handle other types of documents from the 1Password database.
The immediate red flags I saw after finding out about Passwords app from Apple and other third-party complementary apps were their trust. Apple, despite its effort to play the champion of privacy and security, is not keeping its products in line. However, the corporate policy of a Californian company valued at $3 trillion is less of a concern for me. A rudimentary password manager app and the possible addition of both first and third-party apps to fill in the same convenience features that require user’s vigilance, that I do worry —not only we need to study Passwords app for its security, any other additional apps, running in conjunction with another platform (e.g. iCloud Drive) will need its own vetting process. For example, Notes app, which is also free from Apple, does offer end-to-end encryption, but as to how secure are all the documents, attachments, and secured notes on Apple’s Notes app is a problem that needs its own answer.
The accessibility and convenience of logins themselves on the Passwords app are somewhat questionable as well. The most reliable solution I could think of is having a web front for its password manager. But you can’t access Apple’s Passwords on the web suite of iCloud, which is a tad bizarre choice. As far as I’m aware, Apple hasn’t released Passwords app for Windows, and the browser extensions the company did release only support Chrome and Edge on Windows. Not supporting autofill for other apps aside from Safari, even on macOS, is another downside.
Last, and quite frankly, the most devastating issue at hand is the passkey support. Neither platforms support exporting or importing passkeys en masse. The only method of exporting passkey is to generate a new key. As far as I am aware, passkey does support authenticating other devices from, say, a mobile device —it’s a feature I haven’t seen in the wild yet. Had all websites supported it, it would be an ideal feature to have for anyone who has a password manager on a smartphone, where the smartphone with its biometrics would be the primary authenticator.
In an ideal world, I would be using my smartphone as the passkey manager, where one physical device can authenticate other devices —pure password managers would be no more. But I doubt it will happen any time soon. Passkey adaptation is abysmal to put it lightly, and frankly, disastrous in the current state of things. Not only the adaption itself is slow, I’ve seen things that are not meant to be —some developers seem to have taken more liberal interpretations on what passkeys are. So I hurried back to 1Password, because I wasn’t going to study multiple apps’ security only to remove one subscription, a small fee I hope that will keep the password manager’s future development in check.