FIDO Alliance

The Apple Watch could completely replace passwords and one-time codes, thanks to a new form of authentication being touted as a way to “solve the world’s password problem.”

I’ve argued before that passwords are horrible…

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I mused recently about the limited support for 3D Touch, not just from third-party developers but even by Apple itself. That’s not something I consider a huge deal: the novelty appeal of 3D Touch soon wore off for me, and I decided I could happily live without it when switching from the iPhone 6s to the iPhone SE. It was just something that struck me as odd.

But exactly the same issue exists with Touch ID, and that’s something I do think is a big deal.

Passwords are horrible. They were fine way back in the days when we only needed a handful of them, but these days you need a password to do everything from transferring photos from a camera to an iPad through to ordering a pizza. We probably each have hundreds of the darned things.

And passwords are especially horrible on iOS devices – where we have to switch an on-screen keyboard between letters, numbers and symbols multiple times to type a single password. That’s a problem that ought to have been almost completely solved by Touch ID – yet that’s not the case …

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