Building on its iCloud Keychain feature, Apple has announced a new dedicated password manager app that can manage account authentication across a number of different platforms and devices.
Apple, which made the announcement during its annual WWDC keynote on Monday, said the app will be available for iPhones, iPads, Vision Pro, Mac computers and even Windows-based PCs.
All of your passwords, verification codes and security alerts will sync across your devices. And if you use autofill, your passwords will automatically show up in the app, the company said.
The average person has countless online accounts and setting good passwords for all of them can be an enormous effort.
Password managers are designed to make that a little easier by giving you a secure place to organize and store those credentials, making it more likely that you’ll use the long, unique and random passwords that security experts say are crucial to protecting your online information.
At the same time, the industry also is trying to shift away from traditional passwords and toward passkeys.
Passkeys, which replace passwords with cryptographic keys, are built on protocols and standards created by the FIDO Alliance. Apple rolled them out as part of iOS 16 in 2022, and Google introduced support for them on all major platforms last year. Proponents say passkeys offer a better user experience than passwords, while eliminating the risks of weak, reused and compromised passwords, not to mention phishing attacks.