I’ve been using Bitwarden only a few weeks but generally successfully. Set up a family account for myself and my wife, she using windows 7 and I using Windows 10. I’m the administrator. Collections and individual accounts seem OK. If I log in as my wife or vice versa, we see the correct accounts.
I installed the Bitwarden app on my Android A8 tablet, and although it looks different on screen it appears to work properly. After a few more days I’lll be more certain, just did that install today.
HOWEVER, the install of the bitwarden app on my wife’s iPad (a barely used iPad 11 Air running iPad OS 17) has a problem. If I log in as myself, the app asks for my master password and accepts it. All seems OK. BUT when I then logout, then login as my wife, Bitwarden does not accept her master password. Tried multiple times but no joy yet. I’ll go back again and look for the iPad transforming her password invisibly, but how would I detect that? It’s not obvious, that’s for certain. I hope you can offer some suggestions, to me this is a great mystery.
Does her password contain any “special” characters (characters that are not letters a-z or A-Z, or numbers 0-9) other than safe choices such as the space character, hyphen (-), underscore (_), period (.) or comma (,)?
If you open a browser on her iPad and go to the Bitwarden Web Vault (e.g., vault.bitwarden.com), can she log in there?
Also, are you 100% sure that you are entering her email address correctly after logging out of your account? Is there any chance that you may have used the “Remember Email” option when logging in to your own account, and perhaps forgotten to replace your own email address with hers? The error message is the same whether it is the email address or master password that is incorrect, so the culprit may be either one.
First, THANK YOU for your quick response! This problem is causing me to lose what little hair I have left.
My wife’s password is a passphrase with only one character other than uppercase and lowercase English letters typed on a US English (physical Bluttooth) keyboard: an apostrophe. That could be an issue. I typed her master password into Notes, which appears to be a plain-text app like Windows Notepad, then copied and pasted it into her master password entry. Unfortunately that didn’t help.
I’m not sure whether it’s relevant, but on the Bitwarden login screen requesting my wife’s master password, at the bottom it says she is logged in as c*******@gmail.com on vault.bitwarden.com. That all looks 100% correct.
FWIW the error message is “An error has occurred. Username or password is incorrect. Try again.”
Using the “Not you?” link since there seems no other way to log her out, i went back to the login screen, re-entered her email address and turned off “remember me”. Back to the Master password entry screen and another try with her master password. No joy.
Back to the login screen and logged in as myself. “Remember me” was not enabled and I left it that way. Entered my master password and got in with no problem.
After you give this some thought, your reply may be to change her password to one without that apostrophe. I read through some other community Q&A and discovered that smartphones cause some unexpected distortions, and I’ve read that until a couple years ago iPads and iPhones shared the same OS, so maybe I should already have tried a different passphrase.
Well I’ll be damned. I think your suggestion about “remember me” may have been the key. I realized that i had not tried again to log in as my wife after checking to be 100% certain that neither of us had “remember me” enabled. Just tried her master passphrase again and this time IT WORKED! And that reminded me that the first time I saw this problem I tried my master passphrase and it worked!? But I never saw that again and thought it was just some weird anomaly.
But it only let her log in ONE TIME. I’ve tried this swapping game several times and it hasn’t worked since the first time. Grrrr…
@Martt may I suggest you follow up on switching that apostrophe to some more conventional character? iOS converts it to a “smart” quote. You can deal with this on entry by holding your finger on the apostrophe on the iPad pop-up keyboard until a little array of four options pops up. Choose the vertical one, probably on the right of the list.
“Reminds me of the old Henry Youngman joke, The patient says, Doctor, it hurts when I do this .The doctor says, Then don’t do that !”
Given that password length is better than complexity, you might consider having your wife change her password to only use the safe set proposed by @grb. If nothing else, it may prevent some hair loss.
@Martt FYI, I redacted your comment above to edit out your wife’s email address (this is a public forum, and having personal email addresses visible is not advisable).
Are you absolutely sure that what you have written above is the text that you are seeing (“Logged in as c*******@gmail.com on bitwarden.com”)? Or does it actually say “Logging in as c*******@gmail.com … Not you?” (with no mention of the bitwarden.com server)?
Furthermore, do you see a button that says Log in with Master Password, or only buttons/links that say “Unlock” and “Log Out”?
I would like to establish whether this issue that you are encountering is happening during the process of logging in to your wife’s account, or just when unlocking her vault while she is already logged in.
P.S. Since your issue was taking on a life of its own, I’ve moved this discussion into its own topic (so as not to derail the ability of @C_N to get assistance with their own issue in the thread where you had originally posted).
Thank you! It had never occurred to me before doing some reading of other community postings that iOS (and perhaps other OS’s as well might convert what I type into something the OS prefers. A plain-text version is coming tomorrow. At least I won’t hit the sack with this puzzle on my mind!
I’m pretty sure I got it correct as written, but will check in the morning. There was nothing “tentative” about the wording. And no mention of server. I"ll keep you all informed what I find.
And although it may not be relevant, the notion that iPad OS is usually but not always changing that apostrophe into some look-alike that isn’t, could explain why every now and then she could log in – but usually could not.
I’m glad to hear there’s a work-around, but this is my first real exposure to the Apple portable hardware world and it hasn’t been smooth sailing so far. I mostly want to get this setup working, don’t want to get very far into the weeds if I can help it. More to come in the morning, when with all this advice in hand I expect to be able to get past this challenge. Deliver me from what appeared to be a flaky app!
You had written " logged in as c*******@gmail.com on vault.bitwarden.com" (where vault.bitwarden.com is the server), but now you say there was no mention of the server.
GRB, I tried to forward the following to you a few minutes ago but was stymied by the limit on two links in a reply. I didn’t deliberately put any links in this text, but will try different formatting and maybe it will work this time.
OK, let me try again with more clarity;
On the Bitwarden screen that asks for master password entry, below “log in with master password”, “Log in with device” and "Enterprise single sign-on) there are two lines of text. Verbatim, they read:
Logged in as c****[email protected] on vault.bitwarden.com
and
Not you? …which is a link, and the only way I’ve found to log her off…
In your comment that starts with “Furthermore…” this screen has a horizontal-stripe layout. From the top downward, by stripe, it reads:
Bitwarden
Master password
Get master password hint …a link I assume, haven’t tried it…
Log in with master password …in effect, a button…
Log in with device …may be a link, haven’t tried it…
Enterprise single sign-on …may be a link, haven’t tried it…
…and then as a sort of afterthought below the lowest stripe…
Logged in as c*****[email protected] on vault.bitwarden.com
Not you? …definitely a link…
THANK YOU very much for your assistance with my wife’s master password issue yesterday evening!
Following your suggestions I simply eliminated the apostrophe in her master password and the problems seem to have all gone away. Hurrah!
However, it reminds me that a number of her passwords and mine contain various special characters. So far all of them work from our Windows laptops, but now it’s clear that I need to verify that they all still work when sourced from our Android A8 and Apple iPad 11 Air tablets. There would likely be problems with passwords sourced from our cellphones as well, but for the immediate future those don’t need the Bitwarden capability. I suspect some additional password changes are coming, but at least now I understand the problem (I hope) and will be able to patch or replace the passwords.
@Martt, so long as you are not using an apostrophe or quotation mark, there should be no difficulties at all with entering passwords by hand. There is no other odd behaviour with symbols known to me.
If a password is already recorded in Bitwarden with a plain text apostrophe or quotation mark then it will fill and work normally. It is only when using soft-keyboard entry that you need to be aware of the iOS quirk.
I very much appreciate your feedback but wonder whether there are some exceptions. I say this only because my interaction with my this iPad has always been via a bluetooth keyboard. It’s true that the BT keyboard is specific to Apple products, although I wouldn’t expect that to make any difference. I basically never use the soft keyboard on touch-screen devices because typing on them makes me a little crazy; they all seem to detect my fingertips without any touch required, so the effect is a bit like swipe typing without having selected that option. Anyhow, I’ll certainly pay attention to your observation and I wonder whether KeePassX which I’ve used for years, and Bitwarden also, deliberately avoid using apostrophes and quotation marks in passwords. Now that I think about it I don’t think I’ve ever noticed them embedded in auto-generated passwords. My wife is using a passphrase (as am I) so when I created hers I wasn’t thinking about avoiding punctuation marks.
Whether quotation marks of any form are made curly rather than straight is a function of the application rather than the keyboard, albeit I use an Apple pencil on the iPad (saves on finger problems), the wireless keyboard being for the Mac. You should have no problem with non-quotes. I use my own password generator with anything except quotes, with never a problem. The Bitwarden set is iOS-safe
I would avoid Unicode too. They misbehave due to having multiple binary representations for the same character. If, as @Mulled7768 suggests, you stick with the Bitwarden generator for new passwords/passphrases you can pretty much ignore this problem.
I personally would only worry about existing passwords after they prove problematic. This problem does not crop up that often to warrant a big research effort. Plus it tends to only crop up when introducing new operating systems into the ecosystem.
