With iOS 12 update released last week, there are a few noticeable changes to the new operating system. One such change is the added support for third-party applications to autofill passwords or login credentials.
For the longest time, people have been keying-in user credentials across all their devices manually. And to keep things simple, they have been using the same password for all their accounts, which is a bad practice and leaves your account vulnerable. Therefore, it is always advisable to choose a strong, complex and different password every time you signup for a new service.
With hundreds of services available on the Internet and people owning dozens of accounts across these services, it becomes tough to remember passwords for every individual account. This is where a Password Manager comes in handy. It allows you to keep track of all the login credentials for different accounts in one place and access it across different platforms when required. Since it stores credentials for all your accounts, it is necessary to secure it with a strong and complex password. This password is called a Master Password and is required every time you access the app.
Apparently, with the use of Password Manager, there is still the struggle of going in-and-out of apps to fill the login credentials. Because every time you have to fill out a login form, you need to constantly juggle between the app you have to key-in the credentials to and the Password Manager app, which is not a seamless experience and often causes people to stop using the service anymore. This problem led Apple and more recently Android to come up with the autofill feature on their devices, which pops-up the option to autofill as soon as you open a login form. And no longer require you to juggle between the apps to fill out the form.
Until iOS 11, if you had to use the autofill feature on your device, you had to use iCloud Keychain to key-in your login credentials, which worked just fine but failed to encourage more people into using it on a regular basis. However, with iOS 12, things have changed and Apple has now added support for third-party applications to use passwords stored on these applications with autofill. At the time of writing this article, the only applications supporting this feature are 1Password, Zoho Vault and LastPass. If you happen to use either of these apps on your device, you will get the option to autofill the login credentials directly within the app without having to switch between the apps.
Here are the steps to enable the autofill feature on your device:
- Go into the Settings app and scroll down until you find ‘Passwords & Accounts’.
- On the next screen go ahead and select ‘Autofill Passwords’.
- Turn ON ‘Autofill Passwords’ and select an app from the ‘Allow Filling Form’ option.
So, without wasting any time, go ahead and sign up for either of the Password Managers.