Passwordless Future

I’ve been sweating for the past three hours about something I never thought I would struggle to do. First of all, I don’t even know what exactly is with African mothers and forgetting their gmail password.

I’ve been trying to get into my mother’s gmail account for about an hour and after trying thousands of passwords and still seeing password incorrect, I decided to take matters into my own hands. My mom’s old phone started freezing a lot so I decided to get her a new one. (why didn’t nobody tell me Samsung set up was so complicated?). It’s either Apple has spoiled me or I’m just lazy now or Samsung setup is complicated but I strongly think it is the latter.

After going through a lot to set up, she wanted WhatsApp and other apps. That was the beginning of my troubles. Google asked me to log into my gmail account and my mom couldn’t remember her password. At first she was even telling me her bank pin and I told her never to say those digits to anyone, except me of course.

You might be asking why not save myself from all the troubles and just reset password. Oh boy! I tried that so many times. That problem with that method was the old phone was needed in the process for certain confirmation. And this was the case where the old phone was acting so slow. Even with receiving notifications, it was acting as if we were stressing her to deliver the notification.

I then remembered there was something called passkey. With passkeys, it’s completely passwordless. And with google passkey, all you need is fingerprint or screen lock. So I used the screen lock of the phone to log into the gmail and then changed the password. Of course when I was doing this, the phone was very slow but a little bearable this time.

To add a passkey to your google account, all you need to do is to log in to your account, go to security and then add passkey.

You should have seen how I threw the old phone away after accessing the google account. Whoever created passkeys should be awarded because imagine being able to log into your google account with your fingerprint or screen lock when you’ve forgotten your password. But then, I also think you should be careful with passkeys if you are one to share your phone with others.

I can hear my mom calling me to “do” her Facebook for her and best believe that, this is my cue to go to bed. I’m not going through that valley the second time even if Facebook has passkeys.