Pages

Saturday, February 7, 2015

Bought Lastpass premium again

computer

A long time ago, when I had the iPhone 3GS I think, I subscribed to Lastpass premium because I use it to store all my passwords and you cannot use it without the premium subscription on a mobile phone. After it expired, I decided not to buy the subscription because I found out that I could use Keepass on the iPhone with MiniKeepass app, free of charge. Of course I didn't deviate from Lastpass on the desktop because it was way convenient than any other solution. So I had to sync the Lastpass passwords with Keepass once in a while. I stored the password database in Dropbox and opened it from the Keepass app. Then I had to copy username and password for each of the websites I wanted to log into. Tedious task, I know, but it would be quite similar with Lastpass as well unless you wanted to use its own inbuilt browser, which I doubt anyone uses.

Fast forward to 2014. With iOS 8, Apple made it possible for Lastpass to integrate with Safari. I still didn't want to switch from Keepass because I was quite used to using it and because Safari itself came with password auto-filling capabilities. Sure, you had to do the first time manually, but after that it was easier. I believe it didn't work with all website, still it was a welcome addition. Chrome also synced up passwords with desktop profile, however I hardly used it on the iPhone because Safari delivered a superior user experience.

And now it's 2015, and I have finally switched to Android. Specifically, Lollipop. With Android, you can do even more. Not only you can fill the passwords automatically in the browser, but you can do the same for almost all the apps installed in the phone as well. This is very useful as some of the banking and credit card apps don't let to save the password in the app for automatic login.

I felt that this was the sign I was waiting for to renew my Lastpass premium subscription. It was indeed possible to use Keepass on Android, but there was no official app. I had to use a 3rd party app, and it didn't want to store the master password for the database, so it was still a bit tedious to use, so Lastpass premium's benefits were real.

Today I bought a subscription for a year paying through PayPal. The first thing I did after buying it was to log in to Lastpass app which I already had downloaded a while back. As soon as I logged in, it asked me if I wanted to enable the ability to fill in the passwords in other apps as well. I enabled it without any second thought, because it was the main reason why I bought it in the first place.

Screenshot_2015-02-07-14-33-15

I tested it with a few apps like PayPal, Rakuten bank, Mizuho bank and Coursera apps and it worked like a charm. The following is an example of how it shows up in an app where they ask for the username and password.

Screenshot_2015-02-08-07-15-28

In addition to offering to fill passwords, it also lets you add new password info if you don't have it stored in Lastpass. The benefit of this compared to doing it from the Lastpass app itself is the fact that it would automatically fill in the website for you. However, it might not be 100% accurate so be careful.

However, with Lastpass in-app password filling enabled, EPOS Credit Card app crashed. I'm not sure if it was caused by the Lastpass app or the app itself was buggy. Still I wouldn't disable this in-app auto-filling feature at all because of just one misbehaving app.

Cannot believe what iOS users are missing these days!

No comments:

Post a Comment

Related Posts Plugin for WordPress, Blogger...