I wanted to say a few words about Strongbox, its history, and the future at its new home with the Applause team.
I started working on Strongbox as my first ever iOS app a very, very long time ago (more than 10 years!). It has obviously grown far beyond my wildest expectations. What originally began as an app purely for my own use, so that I could open those old Password Safe .dat files on my iPhone, has turned into my (and many others) indispensable password manager app. I can remember how “quirky” the UI/UX was initially as I struggled to get to grips with Apple’s design guidelines. The idiosyncrasies of coding in Objective-C were also a real challenge. Over the years Strongbox became my main project, my primary occupation in fact, and eventually we incorporated as Phoebe Code Limited and expanded the team beyond myself. We’ve added lots of features, strived to crush bugs, and to be there for you if you ever needed support. I hope we’ve done that for you and perhaps saved your day once or twice.
However, ten years is a very long time, and, for me personally, it is time to move on to something different. I’ll continue to use Strongbox every day and look forward to the developments and passion the team at Applause will bring. It is hard to maintain motivation for a project for so long and recently I began to feel that Strongbox needed more attention and resources than I could ever hope to bring to it. It has orders of magnitude more users now than what it had even in the last 2 or 3 years and really requires a very dedicated team. Even someone with the most generous imagination in world would struggle to call me a great product manager. I’m a dev at heart. I’m not the right person to properly build out an enterprise like Strongbox. Our users deserve a professional, dedicated team and an enthusiastic and fresh approach. To that end, I am happy to say that after a long search for a new home for Strongbox, we have joined the very capable Applause group. They have the talent and resources to make Strongbox even better, and to provide its users with a better level of service than was previously possible under my leadership.
I’d like to say a very personal thank you to all of our users, and to each person I have interacted with via email or phone or just on social media. We’ve had some (truly) strange bugs to squash, and some very nifty features to introduce mostly due to your feedback. The interactions have almost entirely been super positive and I thank the Strongbox community for a great many years of back and forth, learning and discussion.
Over the coming months, I’ll be taking more of a back seat role as I let the experts at Applause drive the future of Strongbox. Given their extensive experience and their existing portfolio of world class Apps (e.g. Bartender), I’m sure they’re going to do a great job. I’ll be here to advise where necessary but I get the feeling the new team is already more than competent. Once again I’d just like to say thank you all for the journey and I hope you’ll continue to love Strongbox.
– Mark (Strongbox Founder)
