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Comment by ok_dad | Hacker News Reader

Luckily if they die another will rise up. At this point I’m thinking I’ll just use the Apple Keychain if Bitwarden gets up to no good again.

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It probably doesn't matter for you if you'll never be leaving Apple's ecosystem, but for anyone else, I think that's something to keep in mind before moving to a non-portable solution like Apple keychain.

I would love to use Apple keychain but you're right - as a mixed OS user, it's a tough sell.

Just thinking outloud to myself - if Apple could embed their key management tech in a simple cross platform UI and support Windows, Linux, iOS, Android, and the web like Bitwarden - they'd be a viable alternative.

> non-portable solution like Apple keychain

Yes, non-portable across different OEMs. But Apple Passwords app lets you export your passwords in a nice little simple csv file. It was a suspicion-filled (because it's Apple) pleasant surprise to find that out.

In the old Apple passwords thing, they used to have that export feature but they took it away at some point. Learned this the hard way when I switched to Linux for a while.

Two things are preventing me from doing that: I occasionally want to access my passwords in a browser (and I do not want to log in to iCloud on that machine), and I'd feel really bad about having my passkeys stored in an Apple service with absolutely no way of exporting them in case I ever do switch platforms. (Bitwarden at least includes passkeys in their JSON export format, as far as I know.)

As another commenter has mentioned, Apple Passwords allows export to simple CSV:

https://support.apple.com/en-us/guide/passwords/mchl35b12625...

What I dislike about Apple Passwords is how tightly coupled everything is.

I just tried to set it up on my Windows 10 machine with a local account, but it requires Windows Hello to be turned on, which can't be done except with a Microsoft account.

Kinda ridiculous of them to force arbitrary restrictions on us.

> Apple Passwords allows export to simple CSV

Not of passkeys, to my knowledge.

> What I dislike about Apple Passwords is how tightly coupled everything is.

That’s definitely also discouraging me as well.

What was the no good that Bitwarden got up to?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41893994

Sounds like this is what they open sourced? So I don't really see the issue.

It was "source available", but licensed under their proprietary Bitwarden licence and not GPLv3.

What I mean is the problem is remedied now and was likely not the big deal people thought it was. Sounds like they packaged something into the software forgetting it was under a different license and quickly relicensed it. But this thread is framing it like they burned a bridge.

If I wasn't busy playing with AI stuff then I would be very tempted to build my own password manager cloud service, it feels like a chance to shine shows up at least once every two years in that space.

I don't know what it is, but password managers just love the high-speed enshittification train.

Its not very easy and you shouldn't do it unless your domain is cryptography. This is something I've tried to do myself as well and realized it's better off left to the pros.

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