Review: 1Password for Apple Watch — a rare, great watch app

I love my Apple Watch, but that is largely because of the built-in features.  Notifications, text messages, emails, Fitness+, activity rings … these are all fantastic, but they all come from Apple.  Although I have quite a few third-party apps on my Apple Watch, there are only a handful that are so useful to be truly excellent.  For example, I love to listen to podcasts using the Overcast app, and I find Overcast’s Apple Watch app to be incredibly useful, both when my AirPods are getting the sound from my iPhone and from my Apple Watch.  There are many other third party apps on my Apple Watch, but they don’t get much use. 1Password, my password manager of choice, has had an Apple Watch app for a very long time, but I rarely used it.  Last week, 1Password released a new Apple Watch app (described in this post on the 1Password blog), and it contains one feature that has instantly made it one of my favorite third-party watch apps: a great display for showing your password.  Here it is: I love this new display because it makes it easy to see every character in a password for those times when you need to type a password.  I’m never especially happy to type a password; 1Password is great because it can often automatically enter passwords for you.  This is the way it works for most websites.  But sometimes, you find yourself in a situation in which that doesn’t work.  Perhaps the website doesn’t allow you to paste a password.  Or perhaps you are entering a code in a program on your computer that doesn’t work with 1Password.  In those situations, you need to type the password by hand.  Having the password displayed in large, easy-to-see, type on the Apple Watch on your wrist works great.  You can glance at the wrist to see what you need to type, and you can type it with your fingers.  And because it uses 1Password’s new Large Type feature, it is incredibly easy to see what to type.  Each character is placed on a grid with a number under each character so it is easy to glance away and then glance back and see, for example, what the seventh character is.  Letters, numbers, and special characters have different colors, so you don’t need to worry about confusing the letter O for the number 0.  If your password is 12 characters or less, you can see it all on one screen.  If it is longer, just scroll the digital crown to see the rest of the password. To take advantage of this new feature, you need the new 1Password app for Apple Watch.  If you have a previous 1Password app on your watch—it may be called 1Password 7–that is the old app.  You can delete it and replace it with the new app.  To get the new app, update the 1Password app on your iPhone to version 8.9.6 (or later).  Once you do so, you will see in the Apple Watch app on your iPhone that there is a new 1Password app that you can choose to install on your watch. Once you have the app installed on your Apple Watch, you need to tell 1Password which information you want on the watch.  This is a good feature: if you have dozens or hundreds of items in 1Password on your iPhone, you don’t want to have to scroll through all of them on your Apple Watch.  Instead, simply add the tag “Apple Watch” for each item that you want to have on your Apple Watch. Note that it doesn’t have to be a password.  If you have helpful information in a secure note in 1Password, or in some other type of entry, you can sync that over as well. After following these steps, you can simply launch the 1Password app on your Apple Watch, scroll to select the correct entry, and then see the username, password, etc.  Or, if you want, there use a faster way.  When you are looking at an entry on your Apple Watch, there is a switch at the bottom called Use as complication: When you turn that on, you can add that specific entry as a complication on a watch face.  The complication will simply show the 1Passsword logo, but when you tap it, it will not only launch the 1Password app but also bring you directly to that specific entry.  Pretty neat.   Conclusion If you own an Apple Watch and don’t currently use 1Password, now you have another reason to do so.  1Password has long been an essential iPhone app for me.  Now, it is an essential Apple Watch app as well.  The way that the app displays each character of a password in an easy-to-read manner on the Apple Watch adds a great new feature to the Apple Watch: a fantastic way to help whenever you need to manually type a password on your computer, iPad, or iPhone.   Click here to get 1Password 8 (free, but requires subscription): 

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