As Apple’s highly anticipated Vision Pro enters the market today, developers worldwide gear up to pioneer a new era of applications integrated into our daily routines. With this launch comes a new paradigm for user authentication. Passkeys, a native feature shipping on day one of the Vision Pro, offer a secure and user-friendly solution to this challenge, enabling developers to harness biometric authentication across web and mobile apps while safeguarding user data. Passage, the leading passkey service, enables drop-in passkey authentication for developers with a few lines of code.
For developers, advancements in passkeys make it easy to design applications where user authentication is not only robust but also user-friendly. The biometric component offers a seamless and efficient user experience, as it negates the need for remembering or entering complex passwords.
Native to Apple's ecosystem, passkeys seamlessly sync across users' devices via the Keychain, utilizing device biometric data for authentication. This eliminates the burden of storing biometric data or managing complex password hashing processes. Instead, a passkey ceremony is triggered during login attempts, prompting biometric input verification through WebAuthn's APIs, granting users access without compromising security.
See how it works in the demo below by 1Password Staff Software Engineer, Kevin Flanagan:
Opting for a third-party provider to handle passkeys offers several advantages. As a developer, your goal is to deliver a seamless and intuitive app experience for your users, not worry about the complex technical nuances of edge cases, forward and backward compatibility with WebAuthn and platform updates, and handling of various errors. Both the Vision Pro and passkeys are rapidly iterating technologies, and Passage specializes in being at the forefront of handling new changes, ensuring that the passkey integration in your application remains up-to-date with minimal maintenance effort.
For example, we are currently working with Apple on an error identified as "Error Domain=com.apple.AuthenticationServices.AuthorizationError Code=1004," which indicates a mismatch in the association between the application identifier and the domain. This issue is affecting mobile native experiences, and we dedicate resources to resolving and communicating this to developers on the Passage platform.
Passage not only handles technical implementations but also critical workflows, including:
Passkeys not only enhance security but also elevate the user experience through intuitive biometric authentication. As a developer, your priority lies in crafting applications users love, and Passage empowers you to achieve this by managing passkey intricacies efficiently. Join the forefront of Vision Pro development with Passage and unlock the full potential of biometric authentication. Get started with Passage for free or reach out to our team to chat about your project.