You Can Now Try 1Password's Customizable Redesign on Your iPhone and iPad

1Password on Wednesday released the Early Access version of 1Password 8 for iOS, bringing a new interface and new backend for iPhone and iPad users. The new version of the app, which it calls 1Password, will eventually make its way to all of its supported platforms, has been available for Mac in Early Access mode since August, and was released for Windows in November.

As a longtime user of 1Password 7, the redesign was immediately apparent when I opened the beta version of the app. As far as I can tell, almost every icon has been redesigned to be a little more fun and colorful, and the interface feels more modern now.

1 Password 7 Opened on the Favorites screen with some of the most recently used passwords. Other than marking or unmarking the login as a favorite, there wasn't much you could do to customize the screen. It was always a little frustrating for me, because basically I never had any use for the screen, and I would jump in to search immediately.

On the other hand, 1Password 8 has a home screen that lets you access things like your vault, categories, and a list of recently created or modified passwords. You can also change how you organize and access your passwords - if you're a big user of categories, favorites, and tags, you can move those options to the top. If you dump everything into one folder, you can hide everything except "All Items".

An older (well, current) version of the app would tell you if one of your passwords was tampered with, and alert you if the login you were seeing was a reused password. Will do Maybe, but there wasn't a single screen to let you manage your overall security. The new version of the iOS app adopts the watchtower section of the desktop version for mobile, which also gives you an overall security score.

There has been some controversy around 1Password 8, when the company announced that the user interface of its Mac apps would be powered by Electron (the web browser technology behind apps like Slack, Evernote and Discord) rather than native code like SwiftUI or AppKit. Some users are concerned that the change will make the password manager more resource-intensive to run, or that it will feel less like a real Mac app. However you feel about that change, it's not really a factor with this iOS app, which 1Password said uses SwiftUI for the interface and Rust for the core.

Of course, there are other reasons why you might not want to use the Early Access version of the password manager. While this has been fine for me so far, there will probably be some bugs for the testers to catch. If your phone's password manager is absolutely critical to your work and/or life, it's probably best to wait until the official release, especially since this update is a major change from the previous version. However, if you're okay with the increased odds of versatility, and want to try out the redesign for yourself as soon as possible, you can join TestFlight using the link in 1Password's blog post.