Posted by Sherif Hanna, Group Product Manager, Pixel Security

Helping Pixel owners upgrade to the easier, safer way to sign in

Your phone contains a lot of your personal information, from financial data to photos. Pixel phones are designed to help protect you and your data, and make security and privacy as easy as possible. This is why the Pixel team has been especially excited about passkeys—the easier, safer alternative to passwords.

Passkeys are safer because they’re unique to each account, and are more resistant against online attacks such as phishing. They’re easier to use because there’s nothing for you to remember: when it’s time to sign in, using a passkey is as simple as unlocking your device with your face or fingerprint, or your PIN/pattern/password.

Google is working to accelerate passkey adoption. We’ve launched support for passkeys on Google platforms such as Android and Chrome, and recently we announced that we’re making passkeys a default option across personal Google Accounts. We’re also working with our partners across the industry to make passkeys available on more websites and apps.

Recently, we took things a step further. As part of last December’s Pixel Feature Drop, we introduced a new feature to Google Password Manager: passkey upgrades. With this new feature, Google Password Manager will let you discover which of your accounts support passkeys, and help you upgrade with just a few taps.

This new passkey upgrade experience is now available on Pixel phones (starting from Pixel 5a) as well as Pixel Tablet. Google Password manager will incorporate these updates for other platforms in the future.

Best of all, today we’re happy to announce that we’ve teamed up with Adobe, Best Buy, DocuSign, eBay, Kayak, Money Forward, Nintendo, PayPal, Uber, Yahoo! Japan—and soon, TikTok as well, to help bring you this easy passkey upgrade experience and usher you into the passwordless future.

If you have an account with one of these early launch partners, Google Password Manager on Pixel will helpfully guide you to the exact location on the partner’s website or app where you can upgrade to a passkey. There’s no need to manually hunt for the option in account settings.

And because the technology that makes this possible is open, any website or app, as well as any other password manager, can leverage it to help their users upgrade to passkeys for supporting accounts. It’s all part of Google’s commitment to help make signing in easier and safer.