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LastPass for Android can auto-sign you into your apps

Password management service LastPass has updated its Android app with the ability to monitor when you need a password for any application, check through your vault and auto-fill all of the login details for you eliminating the need for you to copy and paste them from the app as you would have in the past.

For those who have never heard of LastPass it’s a password manager that has apps and plugins for almost every browser and operating system available today. The theory behind having a password manager is that you should never use the same password for any two sites in case one of them becomes compromised which would make all of your other online accounts insecure. LastPass will help you generate unique secure passwords for each site you need to register on and will then saves the usernames and passwords in your personal vault, which can only be accessed with your master password.

Once enabled, the LastPass app for Android detects when you’ve encountered a login screen for an application and pops up a prompt window asking if you’d like to fill in your details. If no login details are found for the app, the pop-up prompt asks if you’d like to search through your password vault to find a matching website’s login details which, if successful, also allows you to then recommend the site as the correct one for that particular app.

http://youtu.be/RFVLzqju4wQ

The auto-fill passwords feature is currently only available for apps on devices running Android 4.1 or later and for the Chrome browser on devices running Android 4.3 and later. We tested it out with a few apps and the in Chrome on a Samsung Galaxy S4 (GT-i9500) running the official release of Android 4.3 and found some mixed results using it. Using it in the Chrome browser yielded perfect results every single time we tried it on a variety of desktop and mobile sites, using it in apps on the other hand, proved little more than an exercise in frustration.

For starters, the prompt window refused to appear when the username field was selected and instead only showed up once the cursor was in the password field. Secondly LastPass kept switching the details for the two fields, filling in usernames in password fields and vice versa. Third on our list was the fact that, on occasion, text that had been previously copied to the clipboard was pasted into the username field with the actual username going into the password field. And lastly, sometimes the window just wouldn’t appear, no matter how long we waited.

UPDATE: After a few updates the sign in feature has become a lot better. It no longer mixes up the username and password fields but has now developed the habit of prompting for passwords in apps that have already been signed into. It’s good to see LastPass working on fixing the bugs in its app, if only they could get around to fixing some of the more irritating ones a little faster.

While the idea is a fantastic time saver when it works properly, LastPass still has a way to go before the feature is truly polished enough to become a valuable addition to the app’s feature set.

LastPass is available for free for Windows, Mac and Linux desktop users of Chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer, Opera and Safari browsers with mobile applications for Windows Phone, iOS, Android and BlackBerry handsets for those who shelled out for the paid/ premium version of the app.

[Source: LastPass, Image: Shutterstock]

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