By Wes Davis, a weekend editor who covers the latest in tech and entertainment. He has written news, reviews, and more as a tech journalist since 2020.
It appears that passkeys are now supported for Apple IDs, but only if you have the first beta for iOS 17 (or iPadOS 17 or macOS Sonoma). Beta users of Apple’s operating systems then have the ability to sign in anywhere that supports signing in with your Apple ID — covering not only Apple.com and icloud.com, but also anywhere else your Apple account is linked to — sans passwords, using just the biometrics on their iPhone or MacBook and a dream.
Passkeys can replace traditional passwords with your device’s own authentication methods. That way, you can sign in to Gmail, PayPal, or iCloud just by activating Face ID on your iPhone, your Android phone’s fingerprint sensor, or with Windows Hello on a PC.
Built on WebAuthn (or Web Authentication) tech, two different keys are generated when you create a passkey: one stored by the website or service where your account is and a private key stored on the device you use to verify your identity.
Of course, if passkeys are stored on your device, what happens if it gets broken or lost? Since passkeys work across multiple devices, you may have a backup available. Many services that support passkeys will also reauthenticate to your phone number or email address, or to a hardware security key if you have one.
Meanwhile, other services like Gmail won’t let you completely remove the password from your account yet, just in case. Apple and Google’s password vaults already support them, and so do password managers like 1Password and Dashlane. 1Password has also created an online directory listing services that allow users to sign in using a passkey.
It works anywhere that supports signing in with your Apple ID. For example, if I want to sign in to Reddit and look at my favorite John Oliver-themed subreddits, I can tap the “Continue with Apple” button on the sign-in screen, and I’ll be given the option to sign in by scanning a QR code with my iPhone.
The feature appears to work on any Apple device — I was able to use a passkey successfully in Chrome, Safari, and Arc. When trying on a Windows PC in Chrome, the same “Sign in with iPhone” button showed up, but the request timed out when I scanned the QR code. On an Android phone, I didn’t see the button at all.
Once you’ve created the passkey on your iPhone, iPad, or Mac, it syncs across all of your Apple devices, letting any of them use the biometric logins set up on that system to sign in with your Apple ID. Since passkeys aren’t exclusively the domain of Apple, once it’s fully launched, you should be able to generate them on non-Apple devices for passwordless sign-in with your Apple ID, too, using Android or Windows using either the Chrome or Edge browser, which each support passkeys.
/ Sign up for Verge Deals to get deals on products we’ve tested sent to your inbox daily.
The Verge is a vox media network
© 2023 Vox Media, LLC. All Rights Reserved
