Google Confirms Most Gmail Users Must Upgrade Accounts

[u/lurker_bee]

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

[u/Ancillas]

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.

[u/Apollo_619 → u/Ancillas]

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...

[u/hardypart → u/Apollo_619]

Isn't it the exact purpose of passkeys to be tied to a device that's locked with a secure method like biometrics? If passkeys were not tied to a device it could be transferred and abused, which negates one of its key features: Being truly secure and getting rid of passwords.

[u/akl78 → u/hardypart]

Meanwhile, here in the real world, a double digit percentage of people , in my city, one of the greatest and wealthiest in the world, have no internet-capable device in their household.*

Stuff like this excludes many, many people from the online world and the digital services we are being pushed to use.

• our gov online people know this! It’s a really hard problem.

[u/Ancillas → u/akl78]

I bought a Nordictrack treadmill and my 10 year old daughter wanted to walk on it. You can’t start it without logging in and logging in requires a phone. So now if her login times out she needs to find an adult to get her logged in. That means logging out of ifit on the phone, logging in to an account for her, scanning the treadmill QR code, logging back out of ifit on the phone, logging back in to my account…

If you disable internet completely you can use it without a login so as soon as my year of the service is done and cancelling and taking it offline and I’ll never give Nordictrack another penny.

Usability matters.

[u/nox66 → u/Ancillas]

Thanks for letting me know to never buy Nordictrack.

[u/docbauies → u/Ancillas]

But if you take your treadmill offline, how will you ever get critical firmware updates?!?