Are they safe from Apple shutting down your account? Seems like an all your eggs in one basket problem, with passwords I can back up and always retrieve them locally.
Passkeys were designed from the start to enable portability if desired. The rollout has been a mess though, so it’s been very effective in causing a lot more confusion than needed.
From the page:
> What’s new
> Now people can share passwords and passkeys from iCloud Keychain with their trusted contacts. *Password manager apps can save and offer passkeys on iOS, iPadOS, and macOS*. Enterprises can take advantage of passkeys thanks to Managed Apple ID support for iCloud Keychain. And administrators can manage which devices passkeys sync to using Access Management controls in Apple Business Manager and Apple School Manager.
Emphasis is my own.
Dashlane and 1Password both support passkeys, and you can export your data from both services. I am certain more will follow as more third party support arrives for managing passkeys.
That emphasized sentence is key. Pessimistically, it could mean that password managers can ‘save’ only to the Apple OS passkey store, acting as an intermediary transport, without being able to provide cross-platform vendor-agnostic sharing.
1Password previously announced that mobile support for passkeys stored in 1Password was on its way later. I assume they had advanced knowledge of this announcement.
I totally understand a pessimistic reading. In trying to roll out passkeys to everyone at once, and doing a poor job of UX and documentation clarity, all the major players bungled the 2022 launch. Not having some portability out of the gate absolutely caused unnecessary distrust about passkeys.
But I strongly believe this won’t become a vendor lock-in playground.
I have replied a lot about passkeys. I should disclose a former employer works in this space, but I’m not advocating for any particular company or product here, and I no longer have any inside knowledge relevant to the topic that isn’t already public.
That's good to hear. If cross-platform sync is possible, passkeys are definitely a better option for the 95% of crud that currently lives in browsers' password managers.
google.com (Jane.Doe) *Your password may have been exposed in an online breach.
I fully agree with you. Passkeys solve a lot of usability problems, especially for the less technically adept, while solving so many password problems.
