iOS 26: Apple finally solved one of the biggest passkey headaches

Apple’s next round of OS updates will introduce a long-overdue feature for anyone trying to live in a world without passwords: a seamless, secure way to export and import passkeys across platforms and apps. Here’s how it’s going to work.

As noted by Ars Technica’s Dan Goodin (via SixColors), the new capability, which Apple demonstrated during WWDC25, addresses one of the biggest pain points with passkeys to date.

Until now, passkeys created on a Mac, iPhone, or iPad were largely trapped inside the Apple ecosystem, syncing fine across iCloud-connected devices, but with no realistic way to move them to Windows, Android, or even some third-party credential managers.

That has led to understandable criticism that passkeys, while promising from a security standpoint, felt like a new kind of vendor lock-in. If you lost access to your Apple device or wanted to switch platforms, your passkeys were effectively stranded.

A protocol challenge

The lack of portability wasn’t just an Apple problem. It’s been an industry-wide challenge as the FIDO Alliance worked to hammer out secure ways for different platforms and apps to talk to each other without undermining the whole security model that makes passkeys worth using in the first place.

Now, with help from the FIDO Alliance (which includes Google, Microsoft, 1Password, Dashlane, Bitwarden, and many others), Apple is rolling out native support for passkey import and export. The feature will arrive later this year as part of iOS 26, macOS Tahoe 26, iPadOS 26, and visionOS 26.

And this isn’t just for passkeys. Apple says the same system will allow secure transfer of passwords and verification codes too.

No messy files, no manual exports

What’s important here is how the process works. Unlike traditional password exports that dump your credentials into an unencrypted CSV or JSON file, this new method is end-to-end encrypted, app-to-app, and requires local authentication (like Face ID or Touch ID) to proceed.

The data doesn’t sit around in a risky export file on your disk. Instead, the transfer happens directly between credential manager apps—or from the system keychain to an app—and uses a standardized data format developed by the FIDO Alliance for cross-compatibility.

“This gives people more control over their data and the choice of which credential manager they use,” Apple’s demo narrator explained. It’s a notable shift in tone, especially given how tightly integrated Apple’s Keychain ecosystem has been until now.

The feature will roll out later this year. And for anyone who’s been hesitating to dive fully into passkeys for fear of ecosystem lock-in, this is exactly the kind of progress we’ve been waiting for.

To dig into the technical details, check out Apple’s “What’s new in passkeys” session on the Apple Developer website.

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