Android 14 paves the way to replace passwords with passkeys

Google engineers are working on Android 14 right now, which is expected to be released later this year. One of the improvements of Android 14 is the unlocking of passkeys management for third-party apps on Android devices.

Dashlane

Passkeys is an up-and-coming standard to replace passwords with a more secure authentication option, which many of the involved companies call passwordless. Broken down, passkeys offer better security when compared to passwords for a number of reasons. One of the primary reasons is that one part of a passkey is found only on the local user device. Sites and apps never know about it, and it does not need to be entered anywhere.

Phishing, attacks that attempt to steal passwords, attacks against sites and apps directly, to steal databases with password information, and several other forms of threats do not work against passkeys for those reasons.

Google introduced support for passkeys back in October 2022 in Android and the company’s Google Chrome web browser. While that was an important milestone into introducing support for passkeys in Android, it was limited up until now to the Google Password Manager on Android.

Even if another developer wanted to introduce passkeys support in their app, they could not offer their own storage solution for passkeys, but had to rely on the default password manager on Android instead.

The restriction is lifted in Android 14. Dashlane, a company best known for its password management service, revealed the change on the official blog.

“This developer preview contains Android changes that enable third-party applications to manage passkeys.”

Last month, Dashlane announced that it would introduce passkeys support in its Android app.

Dashlane has introduced support for passkeys in its password manager through the Dashlane extension for Google Chrome. The extension should work in all Chromium-based browsers.

Android users who rely on different password managers, be it Dashlane, 1Password, Bitwarden or others, could not use these applications up until now to store and sync passkeys. Google has implemented the required changes for third-party applications to manage passkeys on Android devices.

Password managers like Dashlane are at the forefront of this, as passkeys is a natural fit. Password managers protect data, passwords, credit card numbers and other important information, on Android, the web and elswhere. Passkeys are just another thing that password managers may store securely.

Dashlane explains that the creation of passkeys is much simpler than that of passwords. Users could, for example, “simply create a passkey using their fingerprint instead of entering a password”, the company notes on its official website.

The company is not the only password manager that has set its eye on adding passkeys support. 1Password announced support for the standard as well last month, and Bitwarden supports it already as well in some of its services.

Closing Words

Android 14 may catapult passkeys into the mainstream. Most password management apps will introduce support for the security feature once it becomes supported officially, and sites will also start taking note of the new feature.

Now You: do you plan to switch to passkeys if supported?

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