KeePassium (KeePass passwords)

For my iPhone, I found it quite easy to narrow my preference in KeePass options down to KeePassium and StrongBox, but once my choices were brought down to these two I struggled with deciding on the one that will stay on my iPhone. After spending a respectable amount of time navigating each of these 2 brilliant KeePass alternatives I ultimately decided on KeePassium. I found the synchronization of my database between Windows pc and iPhone to be fluid, not to mention it was fairly easy to set up through my OneDrive account. The option to have KeePassium automatically backup my database is also very comforting. The only thing that gave me pause in choosing KeePassium over Strongbox was the ability to configure group/entry icons right from within the app. There are some built in icons that you can assign each entry but the free version of the app does not allow you to upload and select an icon from an outside source. I am still able to do this on my PC, save and synchronize my DB and KeePassium will display the icon of my choosing but it would be really nice to have the ability to do all that from within the free version of this app. I am uncertain as to whether this is a feature of the paid version of KeePassium but I’m hoping it is as I intend on purchasing this app once I’m in a better position financially. Also I appreciated the speed in response time and the professionalism of the developer throughout the exchange in emails between us when I ran into a bug a few months back. (The bug was not due to a flaw in KeePassium, it was one that was caused by the most recent system update I had done at that time and it was eventually worked out on Apple’s end).

I rarely leave reviews online but I'll do it for this app. I tried out numerous iOS KeePass apps before I learned about the beta testing of this app on Reddit. The other apps all had various usability issues. For example, lack of support for the latest Argon2 key derivation in KDBX 4 databases, or an option to synchronize database. So I requested a beta. And I've been using it for a long time. Never once did it crash even as a beta product. A year ago I emailed the author about the official release date (on app store), he said a beta-tester reported a bug and he'd like to fix it before releasing. Since then, there has been a steady stream of updates in the past year, each making the app better. It is highly usable, with TouchID unlocking option, cloud sync, and support for KDBX 4. The implementation clearly has user privacy and database security as top priority. (Timeout, local storage of key file, etc.) I just received the push notification about the latest update and official release on App Store. (Apparently it's been a few weeks and I missed out the promo pricing. xD) So I downloaded the official version right away and found it to be as delightfully usable as the beta version. If you need to access your KeePass database on iOS, definitely check this out.

I have been a Keepass user for almost a decade but I always felt that a good iOS port was missing. Earlier I was using MiniKeepass which was a decent app but manual sync with my multiple databases, phones and desktop was a pain but I was surviving somehow. I was patiently waiting for any updates to it but I guess it was all over with no updates for more than a year and it felt like another abandoned app. At one point, I even thought of jumping the ship and move to a completely different password manager but I didn’t want to leave Keepass. Then I found about Keepassium beta. I signed-up and played with it for couple of days with couple of test databases. The application felt awesome and seemed to have all the features that I could think of. Even for a beta, the application was rock solid. However there was one problem remaining… trust. It was an entirely new app from an entirely new developer. To me it’s just insane to entrust any random app for such an important piece of my digital life, so I started researching a little bit about the app and the developer over reddit, Keepass sourceforge forums etc. Found out that the developer is the developer of a Keepass port for Blackberry which had gained positive reviews. I also had couple of interactions with the developer over these forums and I guess my fears were soon over. Thanks Andrei for providing us an awesome Keepass app on iOS and filling up this void for us Keepass users.