I recently gave passkeys a shot. For some of my logins, I wanted to enable it to familiarize myself with the feature. Apparently, the desktop application does not support this. I added a passkey to my Discord account, and logging in through the browser worked as expected. Logging in to the standalone app was a different story.
Upon choosing the passkey option, I kept getting Windows hardware token prompts, which effectively renders passkeys unviable if a user is trying to log into a standalone app that does not open a browser login portal to handshake with the desktop app.
@BW_Michael I moved your post into the correct section of the forum, and modified the title slightly (was: “Desktop Application Doesn’t Support Passkeys”) to mirror the title of a similar request for the mobile apps:
The continued lack of this feature is going to be a major blocker for any customers coming across from 1Password. Unless the app supports passkeys, then Bitwarden is a no-go.
@MichaelH I never used 1Password, so I lack the experience how it works there – but I’m not sure why it would be a major blocker, since Bitwarden’s browser extension handles passkeys on desktop very well. (but I’m also looking forward to those changes for the desktop app here!)
1password also do not support this feature. When you look around at these cross-platform password management tools, you will be surprised to find that almost none of them support this feature. This is because they all use browser extensions to achieve auto-fill, rather than implementing the APIs provided by the system. Only those password management software that focus exclusively on the Apple platform support system-level password and passkey filling.
I’d point you to the relevant links which show you this is incorrect, but I can only put a single link in a post as a new user.
In short - 1Password does indeed support native use of passkeys, both in browser and in the OS. At the browser level, it will detect that a passkey is being asked for, and give the prompt to sign in with same.
And for the last couple of months, it also has OS level integration for passkeys, and can signal to Windows both that it should be used for storing passkeys, and for retrieving passkeys where asked for one from a site or service it has.
