Apple's iOS 15.4 supports adding notes to iCloud Keychain passwords

How to look up your accounts and passwords on iPhone and iPad (Image credit: iMore / Joseph Keller)

What you need to know

Apple's iOS 15.4 beta includes support for adding text notes to passwords.
Notes are protected by Face ID and Touch ID.
There is no new interface for managing passwords.

Apple's new iOS 15.4 beta includes a change that allows people to put text notes with their passwords. The feature is one that is already available in a ton of dedicated password managers and is arguably something that should have been part of iCloud Keychain long before now.

Apple recently made the first iOS 15.4 beta available to developers and one of the changes they have spotted is the arrival of a new notes field in iCloud Keychain password entires. Notes can be typed into that field and as you'd expect they are fully protected by Face ID and Touch ID depending on the device that you are using.

Unfortunately, none of this is housed in a new interface, meaning iCloud Keychain still lives within the Settings app. At this point, that's the biggest problem acing the feature that has grown considerably in recent years. Hopefully, Apple will one day move iCloud Keychain into a dedicated password management app similar to that of 1Password and LastPass, making it easier to manage, edit, and create passwords than is currently the case. Still, the arrival of notes is a welcome one.

Apple's iOS 15.4 will likely be made available to public beta testers shortly and we can expect the public to be able to get their hands on it this spring. This is the first beta to be made available to developers and there are likely to be a few more before it's ready to be made available to all.

Oliver Haslam has written about Apple and the wider technology business for more than a decade with bylines on How-To Geek, PC Mag, iDownloadBlog, and many more. He has also been published in print for Macworld, including cover stories. At iMore, Oliver is involved in daily news coverage and, not being short of opinions, has been known to 'explain' those thoughts in more detail, too. Having grown up using PCs and spending far too much money on graphics card and flashy RAM, Oliver switched to the Mac with a G5 iMac and hasn't looked back. Since then he's seen the growth of the smartphone world, backed by iPhone, and new product categories come and go. Current expertise includes iOS, macOS, streaming services, and pretty much anything that has a battery or plugs into a wall. Oliver also covers mobile gaming for iMore, with Apple Arcade a particular focus. He's been gaming since the Atari 2600 days and still struggles to comprehend the fact he can play console quality titles on his pocket computer.