How to Fill-in from Password Manager on iOS Prompts

by Rian

Normally, iOS and any apps on it that have a password prompt should label it as such. The system recognizes the textbox is reserved for password then offers to fill-in automatically from the password manager of choice. But not all apps have properly labeled its password prompts, let alone iOS’. Anyone who has more than one Apple account would know the pain of it all.

Preface

For example, when App Store tries to update the apps, it often asks users to enter the secondary account’s password as a popup, if there is an app installed from another account. And the keyboard for that popup is without a method to automatically fill-in the password.

A traditional method, and the ones suggested from the password managers, is to copy-paste it manually. But some of these prompts, once failed, aren’t regenerated immediately upon returning to the app — and the clipboard may not hold onto the password by then.

Solutions

When a prompt asks for a password specifically, but the iOS keyboard isn’t offering access to password managers, you can manually call it by: long press on the textbox, choose Autofill, then Password. It will then open the password manager of choice as it should.

Afterthoughts

I have two Apple accounts, one from the US, and the other from South Korea. Some apps, especially ones from banks, are often region-locked, whereby I cannot simply download them all from one account. In some extreme cases, some services have different apps per region or per nationality per-se, and only way to access some of the features are downloading ‘the other’ app. So I happen to see this prompts more often than others.

Ultimately, I don’t want to begin to imagine how it would be like once iOS or other services start migrating towards passkeys. Passkey integrations, as of now, are far from coherent: some ask for it after the password and 2FA, some ask for it after user chooses ‘login with passkey’, and some don’t even ask for it and let the user decides whether it will be password or passkey this time. When it becomes the norm, I can only hope it would be more organized than it is now.