Like many geeks, I have a Gmail account that I rarely use. Because its the backup admin mail account for many things, I have my phone set to check it.
Yesterday, Google sent me an email saying they had blocked an attempt to connect that they felt was malicious. I logged in to my account, and they provided many details about the connection attempt, and they were right, it did look suspicious. Their recommendation was to change my password.
I use 1Password, and for most things that I rarely have to type, I have insane, random, long passwords. Of course, this is the same pattern I used for my new Gmail password.
Fast forward to today. I ran out to do some errands, one of which involved a wait. For the first time since changing my Gmail password, I turned my phone on, and was prompted with a dialog indicating that my “Exchange” password was wrong. Well, of course it was, I had just changed it yesterday. I figured a quick tap on Cancel, pop into 1Password, wait for the new password to synchronize from Dropbox, copy it, and head into the settings for Gmail to paste my new password.
iOS had a different idea. Despite the fact that I had pressed Cancel, it presented me with the dialog again, and again, and again.
Pressing the home button did nothing. Locking it and unlocking it brought me right back to the same dialog. Double clicking the home button allowed me to select a recent app. I thought that maybe I’d get to 1Password that way, but it kept relocking when the dialog appeared. I finally managed to get into System Preferences and into Airplane Mode. This halted the dreaded password dialog, and allowed me to disable the Gmail account.
I’m still on iOS 5, since I didn’t really think my 3Gs would handle the upgrade to 6 nicely, and I had ordered an iPhone 5. I don’t know if this same bug affects other iOS versions, but its supremely annoying on my version.
I don’t know what it’s trying to do when I press Cancel, but it’s clearly not doing what I think it should do.









