Apple Passwords Adds History
A few times now I’ve accidentally replaced a password that might have still been valid.
I’d like to be able to look through historical passwords for a site. It can be well-buried behind an option-click or something. Ideally they have timestamps of when they were valid too because why not, it’s a small amount of data.
1Password and PasswordWallet do this automatically, and I think it’s a great feature. It turns out that Passwords.app added it in macOS Tahoe and iOS 26, but I don’t think the user interface makes this very clear. The View History button doesn’t show up until after you’ve already changed the password, and it’s below the (possibly very long) Notes, rather than up next to the Modified date. So, when browsing all my old passwords, none of them show the button. When changing a password, it’s not until after you’ve defensively pasted the old one into the Notes (or not) that you find out there’s a rescue feature for the data loss that might have occurred.
And, as Marc Edwards reports, Apple missed a great opportunity to use the history:
It’s pretty easy to get Apple Passwords to lose data.
Create a new item with a password of “a”. Sync to two devices. Turn off internet on both devices. Set the password to “b” on one device, and “c” on the other device. Turn on internet. The conflict gets resolved silently. “b” might win, or “c” might win, probably based which changed most recently.
Apple Passwords has password history, but the discarded data wasn’t in my history.
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iCloud Drive also silently resolves conflicts using a similar method, potentially destroying data. The same test can be used. Dropbox, Tresorit and other cloud storage services keep timestanped copies of files when it’s not obvious which version is the latest.
See also: Mac Power Users for discussion of other features people are interested in before switching.
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iCloud Drive was never meant to be TimeMachine. Sync is hard, change tracking & merging conflicts are harder still. How do apps like Pages and Word handle this scenario?
@deeje That’s why Dropbox doesn’t try to merge. It just saves both copies so you can figure it out instead of potentially deleting the wrong thing.
