Apple iPhone 13 in fetching Starlight finish.
David Phelan
When Apple releases iOS 15.4, expected to land in March, it will add a dramatic upgrade to one of the system’s key features, iCloud Keychain. This update will also appear in the next iPad and Mac updates and work similarly across all your devices.
In the next software, which has reached developer and public beta versions so far, Apple will improve iCloud Keychain with a cool upgrade.
You’ll know iCloud Keychain, even if you don’t think you do. It’s the system where when you need to log into a website, you see the box turn yellow and the username and password populate the fields automatically. It’s drop-dead brilliant.
Except, sometimes it only saves the password, leaving you struggling to remember what the username is next time you visit. Was it your email, that clever abbreviated version of your name that you think is super-cool but nobody else would guess, or did you sign up with something else entirely because your favored username had already been taken?
With the next update, a new iCloud Keychain feature will go live.
David Phelan
It’s difficult enough to remember passwords, which is why iCloud Keychain is there to help in the first place.
Well, the good news is that with iOS 15.4, iPadOS 15.4 and macOS 12.3, If you create a new password, but Safari can’t quite tell exactly which username goes with it, a pop-up menu will ask you to enter the username. It’ll say “To save this password, enter the username for your thisorthat.com account.”
Simple, huh? And while it might sound like a minor change, it’s deceptively significant one and will offer a big step forward in terms of convenience.
Which is the point, isn’t it, of devices like phones and computers, to make our lives easier?
This isn’t the only change coming to iCloud Keychain, though this splendid advance is the newest we’ve heard about because it’s surfaced in the latest betas. We already know that another sophistication is coming in the form of being able to add notes to login information—which is also something that makes a quiet but important difference to how it works.
