Late last year, I published a long post that criticized the user unfriendliness of passkeys, the industry-wide alternative to logging in with passwords. A chief complaint was passkey implementations tend to lock users into whatever platform they used to create the credential.
An example: when using Chrome on an iPhone, passkeys were saved to iCloud. When using Chrome on other platforms, passkeys were saved to a user’s Google profile. That meant passkeys created for Chrome on, say, Windows, wouldn’t sync to iCloud. Passkeys created in iCloud wouldn’t sync with a Google account.
GPM and iOS finally play nice together
That headache is finally over. Chrome on all platforms now uses the Google Password Manager, a tool built into Chrome, to seamlessly sync keys. GPM, as it’s abbreviated, will sync passkeys to all Chrome browsers logged in to the same user account. I’ve spent a few days testing the new capabilities, and they mostly work hassle free. The tool can be accessed by opening this link in Chrome.
