Passkeys are now enabled by default for Google users
As others have pointed out, cryptographic authentication is very hard to bootstrap if you simply loose your device.<p>Just last month my missus cracked the glass of her iPhone. Apple repaired it under AppleCare, which is great… <i>except</i>… that they didn’t tell her that the “glass repair” entails them replacing the guts of the phone and wiping it in the process.<p>Apple iPhone backups don’t contain cryptographic secrets like eSIMs!<p>She got stuck in a loop where she couldn’t activate her eSIM because that needed her email, but her email needed MS Authenticator, which she couldn’t activate without an SMS.<p>She had to drive to the Telco with a pile of photo ID to reissue her eSIM. Her bank account got locked in the process despite the password being correct because of some sort of phone hardware lock.<p>This took days to fix and multiple in-person visits to various organisations. If this had happened while overseas on holiday, she would have been <i>screwed</i>.<p>Times have changed.<p>Your entire digital identity is now a smart card in your phones<p>That Smart Card is either a SIM card or an onboard TPM chip, but in any event if you lose it, you may as well be dead as far as anyone else is concerned.<p>Passkeys make this <i>much</i> worse. At least if you still have a physical SIM you can transfer it from any phone to any other phone.<p>Passkeys are not cross-vendor transferable!<p>Run away screaming. Don’t believe the hype. Wait until the vendors get their act together and come up with a solution for transfer and recovery.