I have upgraded only when I had to and I've saved a lot of money compared to the subscription option. Since 1Password is mature tech we are unlikely to see much in the way of new features or improvements in service. No wonder: With a customer base of over 15 million, subscriptions result in a huge positive cash-flow for the company. 1Password support has been rather antagonistic toward customers who have stuck with classic licenses. I’ll be out at WWDC in a few weeks and would be more than happy to talk further if you have questions or are facing similar decisions with your own apps.I was wondering when this would happen. But overall I believe this was the correct decision to make. I know this isn’t ideal for those who love the Mac App Store and prefer to purchase standalone licenses and I apologize for that. While still tough, this decision was easier to make as people looking for licenses will be able to download 1Password 7 directly from our website. Ultimately this is why we decided not to sell licenses through the Mac App Store. If we were to sell standalone licenses in the Mac App Store we would have these same problems all over again when 1Password 8 is released. This is just one of many the reasons why we love memberships. ![]() Mac App Store for subscriptions onlyġPassword subscriptions are eligible for free upgrades, meaning we can keep the same app in the App Store and seamlessly upgrade everyone to the new version as it comes out. To make that possible, 1Password 7 will only be available as a subscription in the Mac App Store. To avoid this pain in the future, this will be the last time we will be submitting a new app to the App Store. However the time has come to bite the bullet and have a paid upgrade. To be quite honest, one of the main reasons we haven’t had a paid upgrade on the Mac side for all these years is that we were dreading the pain this would cause us and our customers. To this day we have customers on 1Password 3 who do not realize a new version is out. Thousands of customers were confused when trying to update because their 1Password 3 app claimed to be up-to-date. We’ve done this before with 1Password 4 for iOS, and have the scars to prove it. Introducing a new app means that everyone who wants the upgraded version needs to go back to the Mac App Store, find this new version, and download it. ![]() □ Submitting a new appĪ new app avoids these issues, allowing us to keep our code base clean and my developers happy. Ultimately this proved infeasible and all my devs threatened to mutiny. Worse yet, any significant UI updates (including the many we have in 1Password 7) were next to impossible to add as we’d have to keep the old UI around as well. Very quickly it became apparent that this would lead to a complete mess of spaghetti code as we tried to encapsulate new features. We actually went ahead and gave this an honest, if short-lived, try. Re-using an existing appĭevelopers are very creative and one approach that some have used to introduce paid upgrades is to re-use their existing app and offer an In-App Purchase to make the upgraded features available. When considering a paid upgrade, developers have two choices: they can re-use their existing app or submit a new one. ![]() The App Store, for all it does well, struggles mightily when a paid upgrade is introduced because it does not allow developers to charge for an update to an existing app. You can purchase with confidence, pay quickly in your local currency, and updates happen automatically. The Mac App Store is one of the most convenient ways to purchase apps for your Mac. I know that many of you will be curious about this, so I wanted to share with you why we decided on this approach. Ultimately we decided that 1Password 7 will be a new app in the Mac App Store, and available only as a subscription. Should it support both subscriptions and licenses?.When adding 1Password 7 to the Mac App Store we needed to answer the following two questions: When 1Password 7 is released it will be available from the Mac App Store as well as our website, and will be available as both a subscription and a standalone license. We are getting close to the official release date and have begun final preparations, including submitting 1Password 7 to the Mac App Store. 1Password 7 has been in beta for 6 weeks now and the feedback has been fantastic.
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