And honestly, nowadays, if tech companies are pushing really hard for something then that is an immediate red flag for me and it bears more scrutiny. One of those "if you see them running that way you run the opposite way".
Passwords with 2FA are simply better and more freedom friendly.
Though realistically I use a passkey for services I care about and a password manager for the rest.
How often do people lock themselves out of their own house? Don't you know anyone with ADHD? Imagine any time that happens it is mathematically verifiably permanent as a fact of reality itself. It doesn't matter that the state still views you as the legal owner, you are never allowed in ever again.
But if true, that means that Google can choose to not provide you a recovery service, which is functionally the same as them not having it.
If Google does want you to be able to log in then they will work with you to make that happen, whether you forgot your password, lost your passkey, or your carrier pidgeon died.
Passkeys are not special in this regard at all. What does make them special is that nobody can use a phishing attack to steal your passkey and log in to your account. Nobody can guess your passkey and log into your account. Nobody can intercept your passkey in flight and log in as you. That's the important distinction.
Even if you throw your phone into a volcano and buy a new one, you can still receive SMS verification.
Passkeys only very recently got relatively broad support for migrating data (after years of promise and no support at all), and they report (optionally with hardware attestation) what password manager you're using so sites can force specific ones.
UPD: oh, heck, attested passkeys are actually already in the protocol. Why can't we just have nice things?
I believe that by allowing password managers to store passkeys, the whole purpose of "device based security" got lost..
And yes, I know the happy path of password managers uses host-based autofill which does add some friction to phishing attempts, but given the prevalence of unexpected but legitimate urls with weird alternate subdomains/SSO/redirects in modern login flows, you have to manually autofill/add an exception often enough that it's possible to let your guard down once at the wrong time.
The most flexible, independence preserving thing to do is to use a third party password manager like Bitwarden, and make that the default passkey flow for your devices. If desired, you can self-host something like Vaultwarden so that you can both keep the keys independent of third parties and walled gardens and also propagate them to other client devices.
To be clear I'd much rather not have learned / implemented any of this, and I don't use passkeys unless forced, but this seems like a valid coping strategy.
The reason is the ever increasing number of hijacks of social media presences and code hosting portals, with the latter being a serious financial threat. Done right, passkeys stay in the Secure Enclave, at least for anything Apple and most of the Android sphere. There is no reasonable way to obtain login credentials for accounts protected by passkeys without physical access to the user's device(s).
Click "I lost my device", enter contact, get a reset link via email/sms
I’d buy that there are too many different confusing ways to recover from this situation, but not that it’s impossible
Fun fact: Google can decide to reject these. Lose access to the original device, try to rely on recovery codes to login with known current password on family member’s device… nope!
When you upgrade your phone perhaps keep your old one in a safe and charge it and login to Gmail monthly or something?
I’m also quite certain the codes could work instantly with no trouble in some circumstances. Now know it’s risky though. And I’m sure it’s a security measure based on real, deeply painful and costly instances of unauthorized access. Just don’t know what we’re exactly supposed to do…
Passkeys could be the savior of all security problems worldwide from a capability point of view and tech companies would still ruin it by trying to force ways it pushes you into their ecosystem instead of just being whats both secure and convenient.
As an example, I have 3 different passkey _APPS_ on my phone and cannot go down to one because of various reasons with each (such as MS authenticator, forced for integrating to Microsoft at work).