DuckDuckGo recommends downgrading Bitwarden

Ask the Community Password Manager
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As of this week, DuckDuckGo on my Mac no longer works with Bitwarden. It’s claiming my Bitwarden version is too new (2025.5.0 / 2025.5.1) and I should manually download an older version to downgrade. It’s even providing a download link ( see screenshot below ).
I’m not a big fan of manually downgrading any software, let alone a password manager, so that’s not going to happen. Right now, I’m back to copying/pasting my passwords into DuckDuckGo again.

As I could not find any comments on this using search, I’ll post my questions here. Has anyone else had this? Any news as to what’s caused this? And who’s working on a solution?

DuckDuckGo Settings Screenshot
DuckDuckGo Settings Screenshot1842×1178 251 KB

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Thanks for sharing, I’ve passed this along to the team for review.

EDIT: I was able to reproduce on the latest version of both apps on mac.

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Out of curiosity: what is your DDG browser version?

PS: And your MacOS version?

And there might be a related open GitHub issue: Cannot connect BitWarden and DuckDuckGo on macOS · Issue #15104 · bitwarden/clients · GitHub → but there is no report of DDG “offering” a BW downgrade, so that should probably be added (or opened as a new issue)

There is also something that sounds like some (recent) fix - but I’m not sure if this related to this issue here at all (or if it should fix another issue): [PM-21884] Fix DuckDuckGo integration when SDK is enabled for decrypt by quexten · Pull Request #14884 · bitwarden/clients · GitHub

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By default, I’m on the latest stable version of everything.
DuckDuckGo: 1.142.0 (453) - latest version according to Update check.
MacOS: Sequoia 15.5

Note: not sure this matters much, but this is an Intel Macbook Pro (2020).

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Just updated to DuckDuckGo 1.143.0 (458) (on MacOS: 15.5) and still I get the downgrade message DDG is my daily driver and because Bitwarden has a strong will to upgrade to the newer version I downgrade BW at least 2 time per day :frowning: (please assist them in fixing this issue)

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The team is aware and looking into the issue, thanks for sharing additional info!

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Update from one of the developers (with a link to a possible fix or rather a test version and a request for feedback if that fixes it).

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Unfortunately, no luck. I installed Bitwarden-2025.6.1-universal.dmg as requested. Also, DuckDuckGo got updated today to 1.143.0 (458).

The message asking to downgrade Bitwarden has disappeared from DDG. However, it now continues to tell me it cannot communicate with Bitwarden and wants to restart Bitwarden. I let it restart - just to get back to the same error message (cannot communicate with Bitwarden).

If I ignore the message in DDG (cancel) - it lets me continue. Then, when I want to login, I get the prompt that Bitwarden is locked. If I click on it, it just redirects me to Bitwarden which is open. But it won’t fill out the password for me.

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I have the same issue. The message from DDG to downgrade to an older version of bitwarden doesn`t work on mac. DDG recommended to downgrade to a Bitwarden Vers. 2024.V9 and starts an download automatically. But in my case on my mac i get an much newer Version 2025.5.1 (43022). And this doesn´t work at all. Any fixing planned? Thx

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Thanks for the updates all, please continue to follow updates here: Cannot connect BitWarden and DuckDuckGo on macOS · Issue #15104 · bitwarden/clients · GitHub