Enough said.
With each passing day, I grow more concerned about amazing indie apps being acquired by so-called efficiency-driven software companies.
I’m mostly worried about Alfred, PopClip, BetterTouchTool, Hazel, Keyboard Maestro.
Hoping that these apps are niche enough that they will remain out of sight from companies like Applause.
Crap news. Easily the best password manager I found and had several great and unique features. Just hope that KeePassium can make the most of its new interest and catch up.
I think that’s one app you don’t need to be concerned about in this context. Full disclosure: I’m a moderator on the Alfred forum and know the developers personally.
Stephen
This is awesome. Anxiety level 60 > 20% .
Well I think I’ll keep using it (I have a lifetime license after all) but we’ll see if they learned their lesson with the Bartender acquisition. After all, Bartender as a product is still doing well and their licensing scheme as far as I know hasn’t changed.
I think it’s the experience with voice dream reader that has people on edge. They reneged on lifetime plans and tried to bounce people into subscriptions, and only u-turned when there was a backlash from various online communities for visually impaired people, which was a key audience for the app. They also added a load of trackers to it, as they did with Bartender.
I don’t think they’re going to shovel spyware into it, so I’m happy to keep using it for now. But Applause are so at odds with both the history of the previous dev and the open source backdrop behind Keepass that it’s hard to imagine they’ll do it justice. If anything, Strongbox is overkill for most users. The only reason for things like WiFi sync and SFTP server is for enthusiasts like me. I strongly suspect they’ll stop supporting these kind of features in time in favour of simple cloud sync.
Well, tracking customers is expected after because users flagged as “this person is using a sophisticated password manager” is a valuable audience in the ad world. Not that I would like it, but I’m ok with it.
Wi-fi sync in my case is useful so I can have both my personal and work passwords in the same app without having iCloud Drive enabled on my work computer.
We’ll see the direction the product takes!
I asked both 9to5Mac and MacRumors to cover this but they didn’t
As for me, I have moved onto Apple Passwords for logins and Bitwarden for TOTPs. Wasn’t very happy doing that as Strongbox was legit unbeatable when it came to feature set and integration across apple platforms.
Why do you think they had to sell? One time payment for lifetime license does not cut it these days for a security app that can require significant upkeep.