Hey Folks maybe someone can help. I’ve been trying for the few hours to set up a Bitwarden Passkey as mentioned in this article here but I keep on bumping into the error below.
I’m trying from the Web vault using the latest Chrome version on my MacOS laptop
Here’s the steps I take:
Go to Settings > Security > “Login with Passkey“ and click on “Turn on“
Type my master password
I choose to save the PassKey on my phone (instead of the laptop)
I scan the QR code with my Android phone
I confirm the biometrics to create Passkey on the mobile device
Go back to bitwarden. com on my laptop and name the Passkey
I finally hit “Turn on“ from the dialog (bottom) and I get the Chrome error saying Bitwarden can’t reach Google Password Manager
@MrSlash Hm, I just tried this myself with my Android 15 device – and though I had to repeat it several times - in the end, it worked.
The repetition seemed to have been necessary (in my case), because (of course) 1. I forgot that bluetooth must be activated on both devices, 2. I had to choose/set Google Password Manager as an additional passkey provider on my phone (besides Bitwarden as the default setting) and 3. finally, I think in at least one case I waited too long to react so that the connection “broke”… If those conditions are met, it should work.
BTW, Google Password Manager is always the plaform credential manager on Android… at least my phone can’t store passkeys on the phone itself (as “hardware-bound passkeys”), so they indeed end up in my Google account in those cases here. You should check, where your passkey ends up, if you succeed.
PS: … you didn’t mention anything about what happened on your phone… did you get any error message there? – Ah, and one additional thing: for surch QR codes, it always works best to use the “Scan QR code” function of the Android tiles.
Thanks a ton @Nail1684 for checking. Yes, bluetooth is always enabled on both devices and I’m saving the passkey in Google Password Manager (I can see the new passkey passwords. google. com).
After a bit of debugging… I noticed a few things.
I can create the Passkey only if I uncheck the option “use for vault encryption“ during creation.
I checked and I see a Passkey in Google password Manager and I have the option to Login option in Bitwarden web valut. In this case I don’t see any errors on my Phone.
If I check “use for vault encryption“ I get the error above on my Web browser. No errors on phone.
No matter if I create a new passkey with or without the option to “use it for vault encryption“ I can’t use it to log in. On Web I see the error above ”Can’t reach Google Password Manager” and on mobile this small dialog saying “Something went wrong, restart the process on your other device and try again“
@MrSlash Short first answer - I may check some things again, later.
I should have added: I’m on Windows 11. – I have no first-hand experience with “Bitwarden and MacOS”. What is your MacOS version? (just for general info…)
And I could create the passkey “with encryption” (Google can store passkeys with PRF). As I already deleted it, and didn’t try to login with it, I may test that again. (but as I didn’t get any error message in the end, I think it should have been a fully functional passkey)
Hey @Nail1684 I did a ton of debugging and apparently I was able to overcome the error above by simply storing the Bitwarden passkey in my “secondary“ Google account Password Manager.
I basically have 2 Google accounts, the “primary” one that I use regularly on all my devices and a “secondary“ one I rarely check (mostly used when I don’t want to disclose my primary email).
Here’s what I did:
I logged out all accounts on my Android tablet, and then logged back in only with my “secondary account“.
Went to Bitwarden.com on my laptop and added a new passkey
When prompted I choose to store the passkey using the QR code
Scanned it with the tablet and then selected the Google Password Manager of my “secondary“ account.
Made sure to check “use for vault encryption“ before saving
Boom. No errors.
It’s so strange… What do you think it’s the issue with the primary account?
Could be some weird cached data that is still tied to the primary account from when I tested the passkeys in beta? Not sure though… I even deleted all data from the Password Manager to avoid this and it still didn’t work. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Sorry, I think I don’t have any better explanation right now than you yourself…
Actually, I just skimmed through our previous dialog – I think we never discussed, that you could also try to open the BW web vault on your Android tablet directly in your browser and add a login-passkey from there. Maybe Google Password Manager can handle that with your other Google account.
