I think the one little thing that bothers me about the whole 1Password using Electron kerfuffle is a statement made by Michael Fey, that I can’t seem to find now, so I may be completely off here. Even if it wasn’t Mr. Fey who said it, it still bothers me.
Me paraphrasing.
“The Electron UI is a thin layer over the Rust engine.”
That is a really great design, right? All the shared code jammed into this newly built Rust engine. Rust is fast and built so folks avoid lower level pitfalls. Great!
What I want to understand better is, why not use your existing Mac and Windows desktop client code and build feature parity on top of that new engine? Mr. Fey had mentioned the Mac and Windows clients had diverged so just work toward getting them in sync?
On the flip side how can you not consider using Electron when what you’re selling is a service? Yes, 1Password is a service that works across multiple platforms. I tip my hat to the entire team for that. They’re going to provide an easy to use password management system across iOS, Mac, Android, Windows, and Linux. Wow! That’s quite an accomplishment.
Would I love a native client? Of course I would. Will I stop using 1Password? Nope.
Oh, something to keep in mind my fellow Mac psychofants. An M1 Mac can run the iOS version of 1Password, it’s a native application.