HACKER Q&A
📣 fuzztester

Will passkeys make passwords obsolete, or will both exist?


Will passkeys make passwords obsolete, or will both exist?


  👤 rzzzwilson Accepted Answer ✓
I hope both will exist, because I want to use passwords. Each month I regularly log into many accounts and can remember the password to each. They are mostly 16 characters or more in length and all different and regularly changed. Why would I swap that for a system that fails if I lose my phone or hardware gadget?

👤 LinuxBender
Will passkeys make passwords obsolete, or will both exist?

None of the sites I use have suggested they would add passkeys. If passkeys depend on cellphones then I will be excluded from sites that drop passwords and require passkeys. This is probably fine for me personally as it aligns with my goal of dropping sites that I can not quickly reach a human. I only provide my cell phone number to a site if I have a binding contract with them, can reach real humans, are based in the US and I can drive to their HQ in less than 1 day and meet with real people. The bar is even higher if I am to install that companies phone app. I've only ever made one exception to this. Perhaps websites would be happy to exclude my kind.


👤 legrande
I think it's nice to have diversity on how to authenticate. Passkeys are useful in a certain context, but I imagine the technology won't exactly 'kill the password' anytime soon. I think the 'password killer' idea is framing it wrong.

👤 thomashorrobin
Given that they achieve widespread adoption, Google and Apple will kill passwords in favour of passkeys in a similar way to how they killed http in favour of https. You can still use http, but in production it's impractical for most websites

👤 fuzztester
Thanks to all who replied.