IOS software
Swipe away your touchscreen troubles and rekindle your love of Apple’s mobile devices Sync your passwords across devices
Q What’s the best way to sync passwords with my iPhone and iPad? Can I just copy the keychain?
A There’s no way to tamper with the keychains in either device. Because your passwords must be carefully protected at all times, by far the best way is to share them using a secure service, either in iCloud or using a third-party password manager.
Apple makes Keychain in iCloud as secure and reliable as possible. All you need is an iCloud account protected by two-factor authentication, which your
Mac and devices sign into. Assuming most of your passwords are stored on your Mac, first open its System Prefs > Apple ID pane, select iCloud at the left, and tick the Keychain item to the right. With a good internet connection, a few minutes later your passwords will have synced up to iCloud.
On each device in turn, in Settings tap your name at the top, then iCloud > Keychain, and enable iCloud Keychain. After a few minutes, half an hour at most, your devices should have synced with iCloud and will share your passwords. Settings also contains Passwords, where you can check and maintain them, as in your Mac’s Passwords pane.
Third-party password managers like 1Password do much the same through their own app without iCloud, normally for a monthly subscription. Some have bells and whistles like secure storage, but you’ll have to pay for them. Switching from normal keychain passwords to a Password Manager is best done by exporting your passwords in a CSV file, and importing that into that service’s app.