Companies have been trying to go "passwordless" for years, but getting there has been tough. Google has a whole timeline on its blog post starting from 2008. Passwords work fine if they are long, random, secret, and unique, but the human element of passwords is always a problem. We aren't great at memorizing long, random strings of characters. It's tempting to write down passwords or reuse them, and phishing schemes try to trick you into giving your password to a third party. When a security breach happens, username and password pairs are easy to share, and there are huge databases of compromised credentials out there.

The FIDO blog post says: "These new capabilities are expected to become available across Apple, Google, and Microsoft platforms over the course of the coming year." Apple, which seems to have started the whole "passkey" trend, already has a system up and running in iOS 15 and macOS Monterey, but it's not compatible with other platforms yet. Google's passkey support has already been spotted in Play Services on Android, so it should quickly be supported by even older Android devices as soon as it's ready.