PasswordWallet looked like a good alternative to 1Password. Michael Tsai likes it — and he has great taste.

Bought it on App Store and installed Mac and iOS versions. It wasn’t easy to get the sync working, but once it worked it seemed reliable. UI unpolished, but workable. I liked the ability to handle multiple vaults.

Looked good, until one day I searched for a record and got nothing. My jaw dropped.

Sure enough Selznick Scientific only implemented basic string search — the default SQL function. There’s no ‘word starts with’ search. A search for “green red” does not find a record with the title “green yellow red”. Search is basically one string at a time. That does not scale to my hundreds of passwords. It’s only good for numbers so small you could get away with an encrypted document.

Deleted.

This is why I prefer to download apps with In App purchasing. I can discover fatal flaws like this before I buy.