PayPal says the rollout will begin on its website, rather than the app, and you’ll need to use Chrome on Android 9 or later to access passwords. If it’s available for your account, you may be asked to create a passkey, which you can verify with the biometric system or passcode you use to unlock your phone.
Passkeys are based on FIDO authentication standards and are generally cross-platform. Although, as PayPal shows, you may have to wait for a site or service to roll out support on every platform you use. Several password managers, including those built into iOS and Android, support syncing passkeys between devices, and there are ways to access them when you’re using a device they aren’t synced to as well.
Despite several major tech companies touting password keys as the key (no pun intended) to the passwordless future, they are still relatively rare. 1Password has a page that keeps track of which sites and services support them, and while it has some big names such as Best Buy, Okta, Microsoft, and eBay, it still only has 38 entries on the list. Even if there were actually double the number of sites that support password keys, it would still be pretty hard to get rid of passwords for good at this point.
