I’m a big fan of password managers. They let me set-and-forget a unique password for every website I log into, and autofill the credentials when needed. This isn’t a controversial opinion, but the landscape of password managers is surprisingly opinionated.
At the end of the day I just want my password manager to autofill my passwords and 2FA tokens without any fuss. I don’t want to be responsible for making sure it works, making sure it’s secure or having a backup plan if where I was storing it fails. Along with that, to be able to add credentials to a self-hosted Vaultwarden instance you need to be able to connect to it. This means running an always-on VPN on my phone, which I’m not the biggest fan of since it can faff with mDNS - a core technology of Apple handoff services. If you can live with only being able to create new credentials when on the same network as your Vaultwarden server and use cached credentials when away, that takes away a major downside of a self-hosted solution - but that just seems overly-complicated to me. I’m a big believer of the KISS discipline, where the less moving parts in a system the better. I guess that’s why I’m in the Apple ecosystem - as they say, everything just works.
iCloud Passwords supports everything I want my password manager to do:
- Generate and autofill passwords
- Generate and autofill 2FA tokens
- Generate and autofill passkeys
- Have all the above functionality on Firefox for macOS and Windows
As a bonus, iCloud Passwords can also do these nifty things:
- Autofill email and SMS codes sent to my iPhone
- Generate a unique @icloud.com email address per-service that forwards to my actual address
- Share passwords between members of the same iCloud Family
- Store and use Wi-Fi PSKs between devices
Bad take? Probably.