cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/20572072
Android has had an autofill feature for password managers for years now, but it’s broken and needs to be fixed.
It’s better on android than Apple. The biggest problem on Android seems to be sites not following standards in identifying their fields which breaks autofill.
On iPhone this same problem exists, but you also have to deal with iCloud sporadically taking over and messing up the workflow, adding fun new ways for it to fail.
You have to be doing something wrong I’ve used Bitwarden and keepass on iOS for a long time with no issues just disable the apple one definitely works better then on my pixel
Autofill is total shit I agree, but I’ve been copying and pasting from my password manager for over a decade and it’s been fine. I get that autofill would be much less friction, but I really don’t mind copying and pasting.
Indeed, I don’t particularly even want it to auto fill unless I give it the OK to do so, even if that’s as simple as a PIN.
I’ve got things worked up with bitwarden to a point where I can put in a short pin to unlock it after a timeout (usually set to 15 minutes) and it will pretty well always work so long as the fields for where the user/pass go are found cleanly.
Yeah, I agree using Bitwarden in Android can be a mess, but I find it works pretty well with Firefox, now that I mention it, why do people get the Bitwarden extension if the app already works well?
I have access to an iOS device (girlfriend’s) and I see it works well and I have never heard her complaining…
Why Google allows apps to block a system service from inputting information is beyond my understanding, but it’s absolutely infuriating, and just discourages the use of these tools.
This is the really annoying bit
FWIW some of the problems are on website/app developers. Not sure on specifics on the app side, but with websites if the dev doesn’t use semantic html input elements with the correct type attribute to denote the password form, autofill won’t work (since neither android or the password manager know its time to do stuff)
Nothing wrong with username/password on different screens (one at a time is good for several accessibility-minded reasons) but again, there are some best practices to follow which allow screen readers and password managers to still act as you would expect.
I’d assume android app dev is similar.
That said… I do think it’s gotten a bit clunkier at times in ways I dont recall being problematic in the past. I use 1password and heliboard or floris board and while those keyboards seem to bug out a bit, sometimes the bigger problem seems to be that android isn’t always telling 1password enough info to find the right account. Idk how apps “inform” the password manager (maybe via url’s in a metadata file or maybe passwors managers have ro keep theor own internal db?), but apps that use web wrappers (specifically the old and/or shitty ones) report their url as http://localhost since the wrapper just renders a local page in a web view. that’ll wreck a password managers day real quick.
Idk if Android is worse than iOS here, not that it is a reason for google to punt on improving it. iOS has its own autofill quirks thay can be just as annoying. Esp constantly asking if you want to use your app or apple keychain without a way to just pick a default…
Idk how apps “inform” the password manager (maybe via url’s in a metadata file or maybe passwors managers have ro keep theor own internal db?),
no idea about 1password, but bitwarden uses the package name (unique to each app), prepended with a special url scheme
That’s quite unfortunate to hear. I use Bitwarden along with Gboard and very rarely run into issues - I believe most password managers have a quick settings toggle that you can add into your notification drawer to maybe get around this? From what I know though, these generally use the Accessibility framework to function, and thus will heavily depend on your password manager - it also gives a lot more access to those apps than the built in autofill framework.
Conversely I remember Bitwarden’s autofill support on iOS being quirky when I last used it (which to be fair, has been a while - I’m sure its improved since then). IIRC it pretty much always worked in Safari (and Safari Web Views within apps), but the actual applications themselves wouldn’t always give me the autofill prompt.
For me though, regardless of the platform it still is far more worth using a password manager and unique passwords per-site than to use a single password (or even a handful) across sites. I hope autofill support improves for those that it doesn’t work well with.