I think this is exactly what _most_ people want.
With password management specifically, Apple has had a Chrome extension available for a while now which has allowed me to use it on other browsers/platforms. Not ideal, but good enough for most.
On top of that, they don't lock you in with passwords. You can easily import and export your passwords, just like you can with 1Password.
Apple Music has had a web client for a long time. iTunes has been on Windows for 20+ years and Apple Music was supported via that until recently when they built an Apple Music specific app.
Now that many sites are moving to passkeys or TOTPs, it would be great if Apple could not lock users in there as well.
> Apple has had a Chrome extension available for a while now which has allowed me to use it on other browsers/platforms
That's only on Windows and requires you to install iCloud tools locally, right?
https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/pejdijmoenmkgeppbfl...
The king of wishful thinking has entered the chat.
This is what they think they want, until something happens and they are forced to move out of the walled garden, and have to replace everything.
But, admittedly, that's Apple's bread and butter, and they've managed to avoid big controversy so far...
https://cider.sh exists and is in various distro package managers already too.
> I think this is exactly what _most_ people want.
Until they don't, which always happens sooner than you would think.
Yes, and they should have it. As open source software that a free market of hosting companies can compete on price and quality for. Not as closed source software hosting by a Big Tech oligopoly.
You should be able to host your info on a server of your choice, encrypted end-to-end from your devices. That server is the one which should collect payments, manage subscriptions, do access control checks, and deliver data to others. That server is the one which should send notifications and push news updates to your devices as well as subscribers’ devices. You should always be able to migrate easily to another server, or use several at once, as fallbacks.
People have learned helplessness (“oh I wish Twitter would add feature X”, “oh, I guess we all have to get a Google Plus account”, “oh, sucks that Google Plus and all my data and social connections there are going away”) because open source developers didn’t stick around long enough to make something that is good enough to compete with it, and is decentralized and federated.
I can count on one hand: Mastodon. Bluesky.
I am working on fixing it: https://github.com/Qbix/Platform
Larger vision for 2025 and later: https://qbix.com/ecosystem
I see many comments replying to the above statement, and I am no exception.. what about the saying that goes: "Don't put all your eggs in one basket"?
I think it's a lot more important to decide who you want to trust.
The problem is that there are a lot of small apps that end up being scams. Or they end up selling their software to scammers. Or they just don't have the ability to properly secure their system (LastPass).
Apple has kind of made a name for themselves as a big company that cares about privacy and is serious about security. And they don't have the reputation for totally screwing over their customers randomly like Google.
I can see a lot of people making the pragmatic decision to just keep trusting Apple instead of figuring out which other company to trust as well.
I couldn't agree more. I use Google's password manager because (1) it syncs everything (2) I already use Chrome everywhere (3) I can't be arsed to set up another password manager that is generally inferior in terms of integration.
I don't care for the FOSS argument. I just want stuff to work and work easily.
Plus, I sincerely believe Google is 'too big to fail'. If somehow Google gets hacked and my plain text passwords all get leaked, it means something huge has happened and we're all massively screwed anyway. So, whatever.
Google might be too big to fail (I don't think so, but could be wrong).
The flip side of that is that google is too big to care. We all know from countless reports that they will evaporate your google account and everything ever associated with it, for no reason at all and zero chance of you ever being able to reach anyone to fix it.
I can't see why anyone would risk anything of value to such a platform that can destroy all your content at any second for no reason with no warning.
The only real solution to this is to self-host, locally. Which isn't feasible for the vast majority of people.
It's better in every single way.
There are demographics where Apple has dominance.
M Pro series are probably the best laptops on the market, and if people keep buying them, is the price too much?
MacBook Air is actually quite well priced for what you get.
Like seven people replied to say this, but they're all missing the trick.
Most people want this because they're guided to want it. If you show people the convenience but not the risk, of course they want something with an advantage and no apparent disadvantage. But the disadvantage exists, it's just not immediately obvious.
Then some corporate machine learning algorithm decides that it's your day to have a bad year, or the screws only get tightened after you're already locked in, and the regret comes some time after the decision is made.
Whereas the nerds who can see the inside of the machine are aware that this sort of thing happens and their response is no thank you. A starkly different preference from the people paying the most attention is a troubling sign. It's the early stages of this:
The thing that gets me is that people then defend the practice because it's likely to be successful. Lots of unsophisticated people are going to put all their eggs in one basket and then have a bad time, which is a result we should be trying to prevent, not defend the people causing it because they're likely to turn a profit. Companies making money on information asymmetries and the misfortune of others is a flaw we should be looking for ways to optimize out.
I think that what is convenient to you, or to fellow engineers, is not what is convenient to the mass public or non-technical people. Very simple solutions, which are often platform-specific, tend to be a lot easier in many cases -- not necessarily all cases, but when something is built-in to a device or OS, this does remove some burdens from users.
Indeed, this generally works better than vendor-specific technologies as soon as you encounter the real world where different people have different stuff. Safari works just fine with Linux webservers because they're interacting using open standards. Then you want to get your Mac to work with Active Directory and it's a frustrating mess because it's not open standards and neither vendor wants to facilitate the use of the other's proprietary technology.
Suppose your Apple ID gets compromised. The attacker is a jerk and decides to remote erase your device. Then they use your account for black hat stuff and get it permanently banned, or just erase everything on iCloud too.
If the password manager was a different service then you'd still have the password for that service and could get in and recover your accounts on everything else. If it isn't, where's your stuff? The device and the cloud backups are both gone because they were both tied to the same compromised account.
Or you just break your phone and then realize you don't know your password. You can reset your password with your email, so now you just need your email password, which is iCloud, which is the same password. Uh oh.
Whereas if your eggs aren't all in the same basket, you can get a foothold somewhere. If you use a third party email service and haven't forgotten that password, you can still get your email on another device. If your password manager backs up to a third party service or your very own Raspberry Pi, you have access using a different set of credentials than the ones you forgot.
Someone use their phone as their only computing device (e.g. only other device is their school or work computer).
Their phone dies and the shop convinces them to go for a Pixel 9.
How screwed are they if everything was in iCloud, vs they were using 1Password ?
I never understood how this argument even makes sense. It sounds a whole lot like you're upset that most normal people don't care about and don't want what you want.
And maybe there are some people who, faced with the risk of losing all their stuff, conclude that maybe all their stuff isn't that important to them and they don't have time for this YOLO! But there are even more people who never even consider the risk, and it seems like somebody should be looking out for them instead of people just saying "shut up nerd, normal people don't care about whatever you're worried about." Uh yeah, that's the problem, they're not made aware of it until it bites them on the ass and anybody who tries to express the concern on their behalf is told to keep their foot away from the hose of the money vacuum.
Same shit with the Microsoft Netscape trial, really. People didn't want alternatives because Microsoft went absurdly far out of their way to stop fair competition on their platform. Now we're seeing the same shtick, again, on a different platform.
I just wanted Passwords to be its own app because the Settings applet(?) is obnoxious to interact with in some scenarios. My passwords are already all in there.
Now, I use a Windows laptop too and would love for Apple to make the Passwords thing work there too. It probably won't :)
The general mechanism for free software to be developed is for the individual users to make modifications. Not all of them, of course, but the ones who know how to. Someone sees something wrong, fixes it.
Apple interferes with this. If you don't like an app on your iPhone, even if it's open source, you can't just make a minor change because for that you have to pay $100/year and buy a Mac and all of this friction that discourages people from doing it. And then upstream doesn't get the little change (times a thousand individual users with an itch to scratch), and the one-time contributor doesn't become a repeat contributor either.
Not only that, you can't distribute a half-finished app to the public -- even if it's free -- because it wouldn't pass review. But then you can't get any users who might help you to finish it. So the state of open source software on the iPhone is a shambles, because Apple neutered the primary mechanism for free-as-in-speech software to become any good on their platform.
Compare this to Linux on a PC where simple things are about as likely to "just work" as they are on a Mac, more likely to do so than on Windows, and weird and complicated things work better than on either of them because even though they're not always easy they're very nearly always possible.
Which is the perpetual sham of "it just works". Simple things are simple everywhere because they're common and well-supported. Complicated things are often difficult, but some platforms make them prohibitively difficult or simply disallowed, and people confuse this with "easy" because you don't remember spending time to make something work when you can't. But that's not actually an advantage, because you're not obligated to spend time on something that doesn't immediately work, but the option to choose to is valuable when sometimes it's worth it.
The difference is just that because of the halo effect they dont blame Apple for the shit that doesnt work. If there is a 3rd party tangentially involved they blame them instead.
And look, I don't feel that libertarians (or, let's kill the analogy, FOSSers) are always wrong. Of course they're right about some things; they're just wrong about so much more than they're right about, its like a 90/10 split, its not close. I think the cognitive dissonance is something similar to chesterton's fence: FOSSers don't respect the massive profit-motivated and closed-source companies and systems which, at best, make pockets of productive, awesome open source possible; but more realistically and worse those pockets are just the software version of "buy a Subaru because we donate money to cancer research", they're free labor/recruiting/tax writeoff/community goodwill campaigns by gigacorps, and its all just profit at the end of the day.
Nerds who can see the inside of the machine and are aware that this sort of thing happens is literally just stating in different terms the stereotype type-As assign to nerds: that they don't understand anything but the technology [1].
1: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/16/opinion/sunday/tyranny-co...
Now consider what happens if people do the opposite. Instead of defending convenience as an end unto itself as Moloch would have it, you create friction against bad choices. Complain about them, refuse to assist your allies in making a mistake. Do things that make bad options less convenient and redirect people to better choices.
People will still do what's convenient, but now the more convenient thing is the better thing.
In theory you can export the data to some out-of-ecosystem backup device on a regular basis, but we all know that most people are not going to do that.
I have been stung a few times by apple locking my data within their ecosystem (eg I can’t export my notes from iPhone out without a Mac, or MANUALLY copy each note which is crazy) so I refuse to use any of their apps or features unless I own my data
The backup situation is terrible - Mac only - Only Passwords (no passkeys) - Only items you created (so nothing shared with you, even if you own the shared “group”)
In short your only option is one at a time manual export
No. Please stop being speaker for most of the whole world.
There are people, including me or my wife who is not technical at all, who will never use anything similar from Apple. Or any similar SSO/access/security platform. Google and FB tried that decade+ ago, only fools fell for that regretful trap if the service has actually any long term added value.
