Just last week, I had a catch up conversation with my good friend and writer David Strom. During that chat, he asked me if I think
#passkeys are going to succeed? My short answer was “Yes” and we’re already watching it happen in real time.
That said, I do think that we’re still early, but much further along than we were a couple of years ago. Adoption is accelerating, but the broader understanding is still playing catch up. Most consumer type users may go and see a new
#passkey login prompt, then they then have to make a choice – trust and hope it works, or ignore it because they don’t know what it is.
David himself mentioned that one confusing area he sees is where they are actually physically stored. If you have a passkey on your laptop, for example, then when you use your phone you need to be sure to save one there as well. A lack of clarity of where they can be stored adds more confusion that is unnecessarily injected into the login process. But user experience will only continue to improve.
As with any new technology, there will be gaps to address, but in general account and identity security is something that more people are seeing the need for and are turning on.
It’s kind of like bluetooth when it first came to market. Initially, pairing devices felt clunky and confusing, I tended to avoid it unless I really had to. Then the experience improved and the value became obvious. Now it just works and I don’t even think twice about it.
It’s very cool to think that we are actively in the time where we are seeing the dependency of passwords starting to disappear. The opportunity now is to continue to close the education gap, remove weak fallback methods and build trust in the user experience.