System tower · floor
Two quite different problems arrive at how to find wifi password, and only one of them has an answer. One is that a device in your hand has been on this network for two years and you cannot remember what you typed. The other is that you want on to a network you have never joined. The first is four taps. The second has no technical answer at all, and the first line of Microsoft’s own page says why.
Microsoft, in its own opening sentence, saying the thing that decides whether any of this is for
you. Every route on this floor reads a password your device is already holding. None of them
reaches a network the device has never joined, and nothing that claims to do that is worth
installing. If you have never been on the network, the answer is the person whose network it is.“You can find it on a Windows PC that has connected to your Wi-Fi network.”
With that settled, the routes are short and the two big systems have arranged them almost identically: one place for the network you are on, a second place for the ones you have left.
Then unlock it with your passcode, Face ID or Touch ID. Apple gives a floor for this: iOS 16 and iPadOS 16.1 or later. Below that the password is simply not shown.
For a network you are not currently on, the step that is not where you would look: tap Edit in the upper-right corner, authenticate, then use the Info button beside a network with a lock icon.
That is the network you are on. For the others, Microsoft points at the same button in a different room: the Manage known networks page, “by selecting any network and then Show next to Wi-Fi network password.”
And beside the revealed password Windows puts something more useful than the password.
The Apple half has a detail worth pulling out, because it is the difference between this working and not. The password of your current network is behind an Info button that everybody has seen. The passwords of every other network you have ever joined are behind Edit, in the top-right corner of the Wi-Fi screen — a word that sounds like it is there to delete things, and which in fact unlocks the whole history once you authenticate. That is the route for the office you left, the flat you moved out of, or the hotel you are going back to.
Since iOS 18 there is a second door to the same list: the Passwords app has a Wi-Fi section, and Apple documents finding, copying and sharing network passwords from there. Whether that or the Wi-Fi screen is quicker depends on which app you already have open, but the Passwords app is the one that lets you search by name rather than scroll.
The part of Microsoft’s instruction that solves the actual problem. After you reveal the
password, Windows offers a QR code, and the next line is the whole answer for getting a visitor
online: “On another device, scan the QR code to connect if the device supports it, or connect
to Wi-Fi as you normally would and enter your Wi-Fi password when prompted.” A camera pointed at a screen, and nobody has read a password aloud, spelled a character twice, or
written it on the back of an envelope that stays on the fridge for two years.
Apple has its own version of the same idea, and it is genuinely elegant when it works: the other person taps the network name on their phone, a prompt appears on yours, you tap Share Password, and the password is never seen by anybody. When it does not work, the reason is a condition that is not met — and Apple sets out five of them under a heading called Before you begin.
Why the Share Password prompt does not appear — Apple’s own list
The fourth of those is the strictest, and the easiest to have wrong without knowing. Sharing depends on the two devices recognising each other as contacts, and specifically on the address or number attached to the other person’s Apple Account being in your Contacts. A colleague saved under a work mobile they do not use for their Apple Account leaves that condition unmet, and the prompt simply does not appear. Apple’s own fallback is the honest one: “have the other person enter the password manually.”
Two things worth saying about the password itself once you have it. It is what any device needs in order to join the network — which is the reason to prefer the QR code or the share prompt when you are handing it to a visitor, and the reason to change it rather than reveal it if you are not sure who has it. And a password you can read off your own phone is a password anybody holding your unlocked phone can read too, which is an argument for the passcode being a real one.
The floors below take it four ways: the phone, the computer, handing it to somebody else without saying it out loud, and the case where none of this applies because the network is not yours.
Four ways in.
Two lists in two places: the network you are standing in, and every network you have ever joined. The second one is behind a button that does not look like it.
Where Windows keeps it, and the QR code it puts beside it — which does the job the password was going to do.
The problem behind most of these searches is not forgetting the password — it is getting somebody else online. Both systems can do that without anybody reading it out.
The other half of this search, answered honestly. There is no route on this floor to a network you have not joined, and the pages that promise one are selling something.
It will not tell you how to get on to somebody else’s network. Every documented route here starts from a device that has already joined, and the tools sold against the other half of this search do not do what they say.
It will not suggest an app for this. Both Apple and Microsoft show the password themselves, behind an authentication step, and anything that offers to do it for you is asking for more access than the job needs.
And it will not treat the password as a small thing. It is what lets a device join the network at all, which is why two of the floors above are about handing over something else instead. What holds instead is simple: the routes on both systems, the version requirements and the five conditions for sharing are quoted from Apple’s and Microsoft’s own documentation, listed below.
Founder and editor of AI Tools Primer, writing from Palermo, Italy. Thirty-five years of taking computers apart, starting with a Commodore 64 — the long version is on the about page.
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Written on 22 August 2026.
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