Daniel Compton

After upgrading to macOS 27 Golden Gate, my beloved copy of 1Password 7 started crashing every time I unlocked it. 1Password 7 has long since left active support and is going to stop working with 1Password hosted accounts in early 2027, but I’ve been using it as I still prefer it to 1Password 8.

I couldn’t see an obvious fix, but I gave Codex the crash dump to see if it could do anything. 3.5 minutes later it had figured out a workaround: disabling the Watchtower service. Watchtower is a 1Password feature that checks for vulnerable, weak, reused, or compromised passwords. Helpful, but not critical to using the app.

If you’re planning ahead, you can disable Watchtower from Settings before you upgrade to macOS 27, but if you’ve already upgraded, then you’ll need to disable it with the following terminal command:

defaults write com.agilebits.onepassword7 watchtowerService -bool false

Quit 1Password completely, run the command in Terminal, then reopen it.

The crash report showed that unlocking had succeeded and 1Password was updating Watchtower when it crashed. The relevant calls were domainVulnerabilityForItem:, OPURLTools, and NSURLComponents.

My best guess is that Watchtower encountered a saved URL that 1Password 7 could no longer parse on macOS 27. The resulting exception wasn’t handled, so the whole app crashed. Longer term, you are probably still advised to move off of 1Password 7, but this should keep it running for at least this macOS release cycle.

To turn Watchtower back on, delete the override and restart 1Password:

defaults delete com.agilebits.onepassword7 watchtowerService