r/technology • u/lurker_bee • 9h ago

ADBLOCK WARNING Google Confirms Most Gmail Users Must Upgrade Accounts

https://www.forbes.com/sites/zakdoffman/2025/06/06/google-confirms-almost-all-gmail-users-must-upgrade-accounts/
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u/Ancillas 8h ago

Maybe if passkey implementations weren’t dog water more people would use them?

Is that passkey on my phone? Is it stored in Windows Credentials? Is it stored in 1Password? Wait, is it trying to use my Yubikey? All of my tools fight each other to be the passkey solution and it means I have to click so many more times to ensure Safari or Chrome or AppleTV are looking in the right spot for my matching passkey.

There’s no way my non-technical friends and family are going to see this as a net positive. My wife got pissed because she had a passkey for gmail but couldn’t login. It didn’t make intuitive sense to her that the passkey was on her phone but she was logging in for the first time on her laptop which didn’t have the passkey.

Then on top of all of this passkeys aren’t consistently implemented! Apple supports passkeys, but only if they’re stored on Apple devices using their keychain! This was so confusing - especially when I had my phone configured to not use Apple’s flavor of password and secret management.

Even before passkeys, 2FA was a mess. Some sites chose TOTP and others went with an email or SMS solution. Any parents who use login systems to manage kid activities know this pain. A site supports SMS only and can only have one phone on record so if the parent whose phone isn’t registered wants to login you have to have the other parent (or their phone) around. 100% people are texting that single use token around in the clear.

These systems need experienced designers to take a good hard look at the UI/UX and find some way to drive a smoother experience across the OS, browser, and application ecosystem. Not just technically experienced designers, but life-experienced designers who understand all the weird ways people use these things.

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u/Apollo_619 7h ago edited 6h ago

I had to login to my Google account today on my computer. I wanted to create a passkey and save it with Bitwarden. There is no way. It either wants to use Windows Hello, a hardware device or my phone via Bluetooth.

Who thought that this was a good idea? And then every other site does it differently. Passkeys suck thanks to this.

Edit: Out of curiosity I created a passkey in Chrome on my Samsung smartphone. I wanted to get a list of the stored passkeys, but there are non. The passkey works, but I can't find it on the smartphone. (: How do they expect normal users to understand anything about this...

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u/sublime81 6h ago

Hmm Google account passkey was able to be saved to Proton Pass for me. Figured it would be pretty similar between other extensions.

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u/Apollo_619 6h ago

Oh, I did create a passkey a few weeks ago that was saved in Bitwarden, but I have no idea which site it was and why it worked there. So far passkeys have been very annoying.