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Comment by camdenlock | Hacker News Reader

This is one of the reasons why Apple is still great. Their designs are thoughtful and deeply-considered. They may disappear up their own asses with a fair amount of regularity, but that doesn't stop them from excelling in certain areas (such as, indeed, privacy and security).

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And stuff like accessibility and environmental sustainability.

There's a bunch of areas which only matter a lot to a small group of people where, when you investigate it, Apple has quietly been doing the right thing for a long time.

It is sad that something like the iCloud Keychain is so poorly implemented across the different devices.

How so? You mean from user access and usability standpoint?

I know I certainly wish there was a Keychain access app like on macOS available for iOS rather than only being able to access passwords via Safari settings.

Probably referring to the key distribution process, where to enable iCloud Keychain you have to approve from another device. It's a sound design in theory - the keys are only stored locally, so even Apple can't access them - but I've personally experienced issues several times where the approval notification wouldn't show up on my other devices, or the UI was in an inconsistent state, etc.

It's true- I think one of Apple's main stumbling points lately has been failing to consider the user experience in cases where, for example, a good Internet connection isn't available, or a particular piece of data has an unexpected attribute.

Thanks for saying what I should have said. I have devices that refuse to apparently sync the keychain. One device has the right key for something but the other does not, and there is no indication of why.

It's worth noting that the iOS and macOS keychains are very different. In fact, if you check the design docs you'll find they share only four functions between them. Essentially, as far as I could tell, the iOS keychain participates in the sandboxing of apps, while the macOS one does not.

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