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Comment by coderatlarge | Hacker News Reader

this carrier approval to move esim problem is more generalized on modern “smartphones”. unless you opt in to cloud providers holding your data there is no easy way afaik to migrate your authenticator apps to another phone. and a host of other authentication/authorization data is tied to the device in an opaque way. don’t get me started on apple’s unpredictable model of sending 2fa to some other “trusted” device which means tou never know what tou need to bring with you.

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> unless you opt in to cloud providers holding your data there is no easy way afaik to migrate your authenticator apps to another phone.

You could self-host Bitwarden/Vaultwarden, or something like that.

> don’t get me started on apple’s unpredictable model of sending 2fa to some other “trusted” device which means tou never know what tou need to bring with you.

I think they send 2FA to all supported devices on one's Apple account?

i just ran into a situation activating a new device in which apple were trying to send to a device i had forgotten to “properly” remove from that icloud account.

and also another situation in which the 2fa code would flash on the remote device and disappear in a fraction of a second. i eventually captured it with screen recording but every time i did it the code was not accepted.

my conclusion: apple had silently ruled that i would not be allowed to activate using that particular icloud account. no idea why. i tried a different one and things went through ok.

arbitrary power in practice.

Google authenticator lets you move accounts easily using a QR code + phone camera.

But no way to backup to cold storage last time I checked. Took a picture of the QR code with another phone and printed it.

> Took a picture of the QR code with another phone and printed it.

Why? Decode the QR code and store the text however you prefer to store text.

i wish there were a straightforward way to export a file of some sort that i can backup without creating yet another special case to manage.

that’s good to know thanks but creates more special cases to manage if i just want to backup my stuff so i can manually recover when i need to (on lost device say).

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