With the release of Android Oreo which occurred yesterday, password management service, LastPass, is going through some beneficial changes promising to further improve the user experience by broadening the type of information it can be autofilled. With the help of the new Autofill APIs introduced in the latest version of Android OS, LastPass will soon allow users to autofill credit card information, shipping addresses and more.
One of the new features added to Android 8.0 Oreo is the ability to autofill password fields in order to cut down on login times and provide a smoother user experience. Up until now, Android OS users who wanted to take advantage of autofilling features had to rely on third party services, such as LastPass, but with Android 8.0 Oreo, this will no longer be strictly the case. However this is not to say that these types of services no longer have any use, and on the contrary, in the case of LastPass, the addition of Autofill APIs seems to have allowed the service to further improve and cover a wider area of autofill options. The latest beta version of LastPass available on the Google Play Store makes use of Google’s Autofill framework in order to recognize credit card forms and address fields, and the application can fill in this type of information as long as it has been previously stored within the user’s LastPass vault. The developer gives an example of how a user can sign into an online shopping application using LastPass, and allow the autofill service to manage the various steps beginning with autofilling a shipping address, to providing a credit card number.
In addition to a wider range of autofilling options, the Autofill framework within Android Oreo also allowed LastPass to improve the application’s performance. Previous to these changes, the service relied on the operating system’s accessibility features in order to identify password fields; however, the downside is that the aforementioned method is processor-intensive and requires users to grant extra permissions. The good news is that the new Autofill framework specifically allows applications like LastPass to fill eligible forms for the user, with no extra processing power or permissions being required. These new autofill features are part of the latest LastPass beta build currently available to download through the Google Play Store for users willing to participate in the testing program.
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