The best Android password managers

Protecting your online accounts is more important now than ever — and in spite of some recent high-profile hacks, relying on a third-party password manager is still the easiest and most effective way to ensure your most important credentials remain secure.

Why? It’s simple: Reusing passwords puts you at a heightened risk for hacking. If someone discovers your password at just one website — via any sort of breach, be it large-scale or targeted — they can then use that same password to crack into your accounts at countless other places. It happens all the time.

And until our still-very-theoretical password-free future arrives, virtually any security guru will give you the same advice: The key to keeping yourself safe is relying on long, random passwords (in conjunction with two-factor authentication, whenever possible). Remembering even a few such passwords is tough enough, but doing so for dozens or hundreds of sites and services is nigh impossible for most mere mortals.

And that’s where the password manager comes into play: It empowers you to generate and keep track of all that info without requiring a Rainman-caliber brain. You just remember a single master password, and the app takes care of the rest.

Figuring out which password manager is right for you, though, isn’t so easy — especially with the way this field has evolved in recent months. But I’m here to help. I’ve spent a ton of time evaluating and revisiting each of the major password managers available for Android. I’ve looked at both what they’re like to use on the phone front and how they perform in different desktop computer environments, since most of us also require their services in those domains.

Here are my recommendations.