Hands-On Apple 222: Meet the Passwords App

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Coming up on Hands-On Apple,

let's dive back into the passwords app.

Because it's only grown more important.

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Music.

Welcome to Hands-On Apple.

I am Micah Sargent and today we need to talk about the passwords app.

You have probably been saving passwords on your iPhone and your Mac for years.

Safari asks you tap save password and then it just kind of disappears into the ether.

Maybe you'd dig it out of settings when you need it or maybe you don't.

Well, Apple finally gave all of that a proper home.

A real standalone app called passwords.

And it's better than you might think.

Some of you maybe are using the passwords app.

Some of you maybe heard that Apple has a passwords app.

Let's talk a little bit about the history of the passwords app.

So you can understand kind of where it came from.

Because this isn't a brand new system.

Before the passwords app, Apple was storing passwords in something.

Called Keychain.

It's been part of Mac OS since I think the early 2000s.

Unfortunately for those of us who wanted to make use of the tool,

it was kind of a developer facing tool and not so user friendly.

It also saved certificates and lots of other things that many people just didn't need to access.

Keychain was the start, but that then became iCloud Keychain in about 2013

where iCloud Keychain would sync saved passwords across devices.

But the only way to access those passwords was going into safari preferences

or the settings app on your phone or iPad.

Over the years, Apple kept adding features to this.

Password autofill, security recommendations, verification codes.

But again, you can only access it through these sub menus,

through these special means of accessing Keychain.

But iOS 18 came along, Mac OS Sequoia came along,

and that was when Apple went ahead and rolled all of this into a dedicated password app.

It is the same underlying system, but it looks different.

So if you've been saving passwords through safari or on your phone for years,

then you already have a password manager.

Perhaps you just didn't know it had a front door until now.

So let's dig in and take a look at how we access it depending on what device we're on.

First, we'll head to iPadOS.

In order to access passwords on iPadOS, you just need to launch the passwords app.

Now, if you can see it on your desktop, then you know, well, your home screen,

then you know where to find it.

But let's say I don't.

If I swipe down from the home screen, I can type in passwords and up pops the passwords app.

Now, it starts out being locked, so I will touch ID to authenticate.

And you can see here, this is the passwords app.

It talks about how you can save and fill passwords with AutoFill,

how it has secure encryption, and how it syncs between Mac, iPhone, iPad,

your Vision Pro, if you have one, and yes, even a Windows PC.

We'll turn on AutoFill and say yes, save passwords and automatically log them.

And then there are also notifications.

This will let you kind of keep up to date with what passwords offer.

And in the future episode, we'll kind of talk a little bit more about that.

So I'm allowing for notifications.

So again, to access the passwords app on iPadOS, we simply look for the passwords app on iPadOS,

and the same thing applies on iOS.

Let's head over to MacOS, though, and take a look.

Here, we can either go to the Finder window, click on Applications,

and then scroll through until we find passwords.

Double-click to open it.

And once again, authenticate.

In this case, I will, there we go, authenticate, and now we're in.

You'll notice that here on MacOS, we have an option to import passwords.

And again, we'll talk about more of that in a future episode.

So on your first launch, it's going to authenticate with Face ID or Touch ID or your device passcode.

And just remember that when it comes to this, if you use a third party password manager,

you're probably used to typing in another password.

That's not how it works here on MacOS and iPadOS.

It's the same password that you use elsewhere.

Let's kind of look at what this interface includes.

Over on the left, we have our sidebar that has our categories,

the all category, the past keys category, codes, Wi-Fi, security, and deleted.

We've also got a shared group here called Family.

I have a search bar at the top, which I can use to be able to look into what specific password I need.

And I also have just those, that list of logins here, depending on the devices that I am using.

So you can see each of these apps here on the side.

So now that you've kind of gotten an idea of what the password's app looks like,

let's actually head over to iPadOS.

We can see there as well.

Once again, we've got our sidebar with our different categories.

We've got the shared group.

There's a little option to get started with the shared group.

And then again, we can scroll through all of our different logins right there in the password's app.

We are going to take a quick break before we kind of dig into what you have access to already as a macOS iPadOS,

watchOS user, and what you can do.

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All right, we are back from the break, and now let's dig into what is already here in the passwords app.

When you launch it, if you haven't launched it before, you might be surprised to see all the stuff that's there, all the logins.

That's because, for as long as you've been using your iPhone, your iPad, your Mac,

and you've been saving your passwords, those have been being pulled into iCloud Keychain,

so they all are going to be collected over time, and now it's just a new way to kind of visualize them.

Let's kind of take a look at the categories.

First, we have the all category.

This is going to be every single one of your saved logins sorted alphabetically by default.

You can change that sorting by tapping on the arrows in the bottom left-hand corner.

So here in the passwords app, you can see we're in the all category, and down at the bottom, we have those arrows.

We'll tap on those sorting arrows.

We can change descending or ascending to, of course, make a difference on how they're sorted,

but we have the option to change it by date-edited.

Date created by the website, so alphabetically by the website, or alphabetically by the title.

That's the all category.

The next category is passkeys.

We'll cover passkeys in a future episode, but this is where passkeys are saved.

Of course, the ability to save your passwords, well, save logins without needing to use a password.

Codes is two-factor authentication codes, so once you've set those up, they'll appear here.

Wi-Fi saves your Wi-Fi network.

So this is a great place to go if you're trying to share your network with someone else,

and you need them to, are they asking you for the password?

Security is actually going to be security recommendations.

This is really cool because what will happen is your, the software is going to look through your passwords,

and find passwords that are weak, that are reused, or that are compromised even,

and then show you that information here.

So if you see stuff here, it's worth checking into to make sure that it is something that you are going to change,

or have changed, and that you understand what the security implications therein are.

The deleted section shows you the passwords or other items that you've recently removed.

They're recoverable for 30 days, after which they are gone.

So once you delete them, they'll pop up here.

If you want them gone forever, you get rid of them from here, otherwise wait 30 days, and they will appear.

Now, each of these entries, if we go back to the main page, is going to show you,

let's choose this Best Buy option.

Each one of these logins is going to show you your username, it's going to show you the password that is there.

By default, it'll be hidden, the website, so what website it goes to, and then also the group.

So in this case, if you have shared it with other people, it will, the group that you've shared it with will appear here as well.

In the top right-hand corner, you'll notice there's an icon for airdrop, so you could share it with someone else,

and an edit option, which lets you edit your passwords.

Underneath Security, it actually shows you that this is indeed a strong password, and if there is two-factor authentication available,

it actually helps you set up a verification code for two-factor authentication by tapping that setup verification code option.

You can go in and manually edit your logins, so if we tap edit in the top right corner,

I am able to see, but you can't see my password under the password section.

Choosing Change Password will allow you to get a generated random password that will pop in there,

and of course, if you need to change the username, you can do so as well.

If the website is wrong, you could change that if you needed to, and you can also add notes in the section.

So we'll cancel, we don't need to make any changes there, but that is how you go and look at the details

and also make changes to those passwords.

Let's talk about what we need to do when it comes to actually making use of the passwords app,

because creating a login does not technically require that you go to a website and have Safari recommend that you create a login.

You can actually do so manually.

So if we head over to Mac OS, let me show you what that looks like here.

In the top right hand corner where the sort functionality is, there's also a plus icon.

If we hit the plus icon, up will pop an option for us to create a password.

In this, we can give it a title.

So let's say this is, I don't know, best pet photos.

We'll go with that for the website.

My username is just going to be my name, my password.

We will generate a strong password, and then under the website, we will type in best pet photos.com.

And then under notes, we will say this is not a real website or login so that I don't forget.

Now we'll choose save.

You can see best pet photos is here.

I've got my username, I've got my password, I've got the website.

I have when it was last modified and there's the note underneath.

And then I also have a grade that I do in fact have a strong password.

So that is easy to do as well.

Now, if you're browsing through Safari and setting up an account or if you're on your phone

and you're setting up an account, your phone or Safari will automatically prompt you to save those passwords.

Let's say you have a login that needs to be changed.

Again, I showed you this process before.

You simply click on the login and you choose edit.

And then you can change the password.

You could set up a code or you can change your username based on that.

And when you're trying to find something, the best way to do it is just to use the search functionality.

So let's say I'm trying to find my best buy stuff.

I type in best and I can see that it gets sorted to just best buy.

I can do it by user names.

So if I have different user names across different sites, then I am able to see where the mic a sergeant user name is used.

In this case, also my email, it all just depends.

And then we already talked about the sorting functionality, which of course lets you sort by title, by website, by date created.

And by date edited.

So here, the newest ones are first, the oldest ones are after that as we are sorting them.

Now, how do we go about deleting them?

If we have one we're not using anymore, you can right click and choose to delete and choose delete password.

Now this pops up in the deleted section.

Again, it will take 30 days for this to be removed.

When you are in a login flow, you are able to then go through and complete the process.

So let's actually, let's go to the best buy website.

So we can see what this looks like.

We'll head over to best buy, perhaps.

And we will choose to log in once the page loads.

And we can see where did that go.

I just saw the sign in.

Okay, there we go.

Sign in.

And once we get to this page, Safari will offer some suggestions to us.

In this case, I have the option of my email address.

So I will click on that.

Now I need to authenticate with my fingerprint.

I will click continue.

And then it's going to ask me some information.

So I'm going to say send a code to my email.

Actually, I'm going to say use password.

And then we will type in the password and choose continue.

And in this case, it's not logging in.

But the point is I wanted to show you what that auto fill option looks like.

Now you can make changes to how auto fill works.

So when you're using this feature on macOS,

you can decide how this is set up going into Safari and choosing settings.

And then going over to the auto fill section.

And you'll see user names and passwords is selected.

If we choose edit, this will allow us to hop into the password settings.

And we can see what we have here.

So this will allow us to make different selections for automatic pass key upgrades,

suggesting strong passwords, allowing contacting websites,

showing the password in the menu bar.

And then when you save passwords, what do we do?

Do not ask when signing in or ask when signing in,

meaning that when I do a login for the first time, Safari will prompt me if I want that to appear.

Now on iPadOS, in order to access our auto field functionality,

that auto fill stuff, then we need to go into settings.

And we need to go into general.

And then we need to choose auto fill and passwords.

From here, you can see that we have set it up.

So that auto fill passwords and pass keys is turned on.

That will allow Safari to...

Well, the iPadOS, the system in general, to ask us if we want to save passwords.

But then also, you'll see that I have auto fill from and I have that set to passwords.

You could technically have both toggled on if you have a password manager, as I do,

a third party password manager.

And then the rest of the functionality here includes deleting verification codes after they're used.

So when they appear in messages and mail and you make use of them,

the system will just go ahead and get rhythm so they're not saved.

And then also the option to set up these verification codes where we're choosing to do so.

In this iPad, we're doing it in the passwords app.

So that is a look at how to set up and navigate the passwords app.

In our next episode, we're going to dig in a little bit more,

pass just basically setting up auto fill and entering your own logins through a more manual means.

But I do have a little bit of homework for you.

So before the next episode, what I'd love for you to do if you haven't done this yet,

open the passwords app on your iPhone, your iPad, or your Mac.

Scroll through and just see what's in there.

You may find that you're surprised at how much has actually gotten in there.

And then it's a nice way to also go through and see if there's anything you're not using anymore.

Old accounts you don't use, if there are duplicates, if there are entries for sites that don't exist anymore,

check that security category.

Let's, I mean, if you know what you're doing, go ahead and do more.

You can fix it.

We'll talk more about fixing these security issues next time.

But if you know what you're doing, go ahead and take a look at that section and we'll move on from there.

So that is the foundation.

You now know where the passwords app came from, how to get around it, and how it handles the basics into the next episode.

We're going to get into the good stuff, setting up those verification codes so you can ditch your authenticator app,

creating pass keys, and working through those security alerts to clean up years of password debt.

So I look forward to seeing you in the next episode of Hands on Apple.

And of course, I thank you for being here for this one.

I have been, and we'll continue to be, Mike, a sergeant.

Thank you for your time.

I'll catch you again next week.

Bye-bye.

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