Mobile Safari has the ability to remember your passwords. That’s useful. 1Password is a third party password wallet. That’s pretty neat too. Sadly, both of those just aren’t the same as having a full-fledged and baked-in password management solution like Keychain is on Mac OS X.
My iPad is my main computer at this point, and I’m really starting to miss this functionality. Every time I need to remember one of my many complex passwords, I have to boot up my MacBook Pro and search Keychain. I just can’t easily get at my saved passwords while on my iPad or iPod touch. So, it seems to me that iOS is in need of a password manager that does the following:
- Sucks in the passwords for apps and websites automatically
- Allows you to access your saved passwords at any time
- Stores the passwords securely
There are countless work-arounds to get functionality similar to this, but that just won’t do with an Apple-made device. It needs to have a head-to-tail implementation ready for any app developer to use. Period. I can’t believe we’ve seen four major iterations of iPhone OS/iOS, and this still isn’t available.
What do you think? Is there some reason why Keychain would be difficult to implement on iOS, or are Apple’s priorities somewhere else? Sound off by leaving a comment right here below this post. I’d love to see some real discussion about the merits of having a built-in solution versus third party work arounds. I know there are plenty of 1Password users out there who can’t wait to chime in. I want to hear your side.
