Apple’s latest iPhone software update, iOS 18, comes out today and includes a new app: Passwords. For the first time, Apple is taking your phone’s ability to store login credentials and integrating it into a standalone app. This could help improve the terrible passwords of millions of people.
After years of being told to create unique and strong passwords for every website and app you use, you probably fall into one of two camps: the people who rely entirely on password managers, or the people who still use “123456” on every other website.
Apple’s new encrypted Passwords app is included automatically in iOS 18 and represents a publicly available evolution of the keychain and password storage features. Keychain, which has been around for more than a decade, no longer has such a prominent place in iPhone settings, and details previously stored there are being moved to the new app.
The introduction of the password manager app, which will also be available for MacOS Sequoia and iPadOS 18, may help improve the way people handle their passwords, but could also pose – to varying degrees – a challenge to existing password managers.
“This move makes the app more visible to laypeople and educates them about this secure method of storing and managing passwords,” say Talal Haj Bakry and Tommy Mysk of security company Mysk. “Your device comes pre-installed with a password manager by default, which provides end-to-end encryption when syncing data across devices.”
New passwords
The Passwords app is pretty basic. When you open the app on an iPhone, you’ll see six different tiles: All, Passkeys, Codes, Wi-Fi, Security, and Deleted. These are essentially the main features of the app, allowing you to store all types of data in their respective sections. The Security section includes checks that can identify weak and obvious passwords.
“This will definitely increase the adoption of this pre-installed app and improve user security,” say Bakry and Mysk. They add that the stored data is “presented in a more organized way than in the Settings app.”
According to Apple, the Passwords app uses end-to-end encryption to store your data, meaning no one, not even Apple, knows what you’ve stored. Within the app, you can search for login information for your entries and set up groups to share passwords with other people.
Your saved login information is synced across all Apple devices via iCloud. This means that the encrypted data is shared with Apple’s cloud servers and is available on all your Apple devices. You can disable password syncing on a specific device in Apple settings. The app is locked via FaceID.
When you use the Passwords app, any data you previously stored in Keychain or AutoFill will be transferred to the new location. This also applies if you used the Sign in with Apple login system on websites or apps. It’s unclear why Apple decided to turn its Keychain system into a full-fledged password manager now, even though the company has been developing each feature over several years. (Apple did not respond to WIRED’s request for comment at the time of writing.)
