I’ve been using the 1Password application from AgileBits for a few years. It has been a Godsend for keeping track of the hundreds of logins and secure notes I need to keep in sync across multiple machines.

One of the more recent additions to the client portfolio is the free 1Password Reader app for Android.

The app allows you to read your secure credentials from a 1Password keychain stored on your SD card or Dropbox folder.

This app has been working well right up until the v1.8.1.1 update which was released to Android Market on 20th June. After that the app would no longer import my 1Password keychain and was reporting the error “Urecognizable keychain”.

After some investigation I found that the cause of the problem was that my 1Password keychain did not have the correct file extension, in fact it didn’t have a file extension at all and was displaying in Finder as a folder.

The 1Password keychain is in fact a package file and the latest version of the Android app needs the keychain to have the file extension of .agilekeychain.

To find out where your 1Password keychain file is have a look for a hidden file called .ws.agile.1Password.settings in the root of your Dropbox folder. The contents of this file is the location of your 1Password keychain file.

To fix my Android problem I closed the 1Password Mac client and then added the .agilekeychain file extension to my 1Password keychain folder in Dropbox. The next time I fired up the Mac client I went into Preferences > General and updated the Data File location to match the renamed keychain.

This has fixed the Android issue which now imports the Dropbox keychain without any problems.