by Apple’s new iCloud Keychain aims to solve an irritating problem: even if you’ve entered usernames and passwords on your Mac, you still have to reenter every single one manually on your iPhone and iPad (as well as any other Macs you use). As of OS X 10.9 Mavericks and iOS 7.0.3, however, iCloud Keychain keeps these account credentials, along with credit card numbers and other personal information (including your account settings for email, contacts, calendars, and social networking services) in sync across your Macs and iOS devices automatically.
Plus, Safari on both platforms now sports new features that integrate with iCloud Keychain, such as a built-in random password generator and an improved autofill capability. (Third-party apps may add support for iCloud Keychain in the future.)
The setup process for iCloud Keychain is suprisingly involved, and has a couple of less-than-obvious steps. However, once you’ve done this for each of your devices, iCloud Keychain syncs invisibly in the background, just like other iCloud data, and normally requires no manual intervention.
Before I explain how to use iCloud Keychain, I want to point out that you’re free to leave it turned off if you prefer, or to use a different password manager such as AgileBits’s $40 1Password 4 and $18 1Password for iOS (
), which include a number of additional, useful features. But if your only reason for avoiding iCloud Keychain is not wanting to store your passwords (encrypted though they are) on Apple’s servers, it’s possible to maintain device-to-device syncing without storing your passwords in iCloud—you just have to know the trick, which I’ll explain in a moment.
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