Hi @jotheman0303,

Thank you for the kind words, really great to hear AliasVault is such a good fit for you. And also thanks for taking the time to write such detailed feedback. You’re absolutely raising a valid concern.

The currently latest 0.26.0 release was an exceptional case. It was a very large release that fundamentally changed the vault data model and a lot of the underlying architecture. Because of that, once a vault is upgraded, older clients simply can’t work with it anymore.

However under normal circumstances, when we introduce breaking changes, we follow a coordinated release strategy where all clients (apps, extensions, etc.) are published at the same time specifically to avoid the kind of lock-out scenario you describe.

What made this release different is that 0.26.0 contained a migration bug that could affect user's vault data when they migrated. To protect user data, we made the call to release 0.26.1 as a hotfix and temporarily mark all 0.26.0 and lower clients as incompatible. This was a safety-first decision to prevent potential data issues, but it unfortunately increased version strictness in the short term, which is exactly the pain you experienced (especially with auto-updating devices and self-hosted setups).

So to be clear:

• This is not the model we want for every release.
• I agree with your expectation of a more graceful backward compatibility.

The good news is that with 0.26.x we’ve added additional under-the-hood support for future backward compatibility, so this level of hard break should become much rarer. We also don’t anticipate another data model change of this magnitude anytime soon.

AliasVault is still in beta, so some structural changes are unfortunately part of this phase, but this release really is more of a one-off in terms of scale and impact. And we always prioritize protecting the data integrity in the vaults, which is why we had to make the call to temporary block older clients.

Regarding Edge specifically: you’re correct: store approval delays for Edge are on average the longest (with +/- 7 working days), and Edge add-ons has no option to manually release an approved version, so we're really dependent on Microsoft here. I have actually proposed a feature request with Microsoft last year to improve on this, but they don't seem to have made progress on this yet: microsoft/MicrosoftEdge-Extensions#292. Also know that for Edge specifically, you can also opt to install the AliasVault extension through the Chrome Web Store (which published the 0.26.1 after only 2 hours).

Thanks again for the thoughtful feedback and for being an early supporter! If you have follow up questions, feel free to ask.

Hi Leendert,
Thanks for the speedy and very complete response!
I figured as much when I was reading the release notes of this version. It's understandable, keeping an eye on the dependencies of the versions and the timing of the releases will become more important once the audience gets bigger and is more reliant on it. Therefore I wanted to mention it :)
Glad to hear it is under your attention!