Why is there no Apple native solution for entering passwords into apps on iOS? Apple created iCloud Keychain to manage passwords, but the 'app' company built their password solution into their web browser. This does not help with entering login info into apps.
Not only do users have dozens of apps on their devices (most of which require a username and a password), but those apps do not retain login information indefinitely. I often have to re-enter login info, presumably when apps are updated.
WWDC 2016 has come and gone, and I saw no new features announced regarding passwords in iOS. Apple announced a universal login feature for the AppleTV for logging into your cable provider, but there was no such attention to their flagship operating system.
On his WWDC episode of The Talkshow John Gruber told a story to guests Phil Schiller and Craig Federighi about a WWDC session he had attended a few years ago:
Somebody asked the question of somebody who was on the engineering team in charge of security, gave a rant about how passwords are terrible, and people pick bad passwords because they're easy to remember, and passwords that are hard to remember, or hard to crack, or hard to guess, are unusable, or less usable. "Have you guys given any thought to what's next beyond passwords?"
And there was this pause, and the speaker...
[Gruber intimates looking down toward the mic.]
And it was like, well that's an interesting ā that's a very interesting and truthful answer. And we've seen, I think, in the intervening years, some of the things that might have been circulating. Touch ID...
And Gruber goes on to praise the announcement of the new feature Auto-unlock. But that doesn't do anything for entering passwords in apps. If you are one of the, probably, very few people who use iCloud Keychain to create and store unique, hard to crack passwords, there is still no help from Apple to enter these passwords into apps on iOS. And that is precisely what is needed to get people to create and use good passwords.
Third parties like 1Password have tried to address this, and their solution works great, giving you access to the password you need right when you select the passwords field in an app. But it requires the maker of each and every app on the userās device to include 1Password's solution in their app. Very few apps do. This problem needs a 1st party solution so it works on a system level, where every app has access to iCloud Keychain when the user wants to enter a password, just as any website does in Safari.
This issue is one of the main pain points in trying to use iOS devices, and unfortunately it will at the very least be more than another year before it is addressed.
