Apple’s iCloud Passwords to become its own app in iOS 18 – report

With WWDC 2024 less than a week away, some of Apple’s plans for this year’s big software updates are becoming clear, according to various reports.

One such piece suggests Apple is planning its own dedicated password storage app called – you guessed it – Passwords.

Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman sources “people with knowledge of the matter” who say Apple will launch the app within iOS 18, iPadOS 18, and macOS 15 this year.

However, it’ll be unveiled on Monday at WWDC, the people said, as Apple details its big plans for the updates. The report says the software will be able to generate passwords for people, store them and make them available across devices, making logins easier.

The idea could be to wean iPhone users away from the third-party 1Password and LastPass apps, which do a similar job. However, it seems the app will also turn something that Apple can already do via iCloud Keychain into a standalone app.

With the Passwords section of iCloud Keychain, iPhone users can already stow their passwords across devices, keep them hidden behind Face ID passkeys, and generate new ones really easily. The tool, that also exists within Safari and has done for years, also suggests new secure passwords and syncs them back to the login information stored for that account.

In iOS 17 Apple also added the ability to set up shared family groups. Right now all that is available via the iPhone Settings app.

It’s likely all of this and more will be built into the new Passwords app. We await the WWDC keynote on Monday to find out all about it.