Passwords suck. The more you have, the more frustrating it is to remember them all, and with how frequently we're supposed to be updating them, that's a situation that only gets worse over time. That's bad enough when they're protecting our social accounts, but our concerns are immediately amplified when passwords are all that stand between bad actors and our money. Thankfully, cryptographic passkeys promise to change the way we deal with authentication, and support is now beginning to arrive in the US for popular payments app PayPal.

This week, PayPal announces its embrace of a passwordless future, as it begins adding support for passkeys — making it one of the first few mainstream payment services to adopt the technology. For anyone unfamiliar with the concept, passkeys are the brainchild of the FIDO Alliance and the World Wide Web Consortium, coming to Android through the Google Password Manager. Once set up, you'll be able to access PayPal on your phone by just using your regular biometrics.

Passkey login support for PayPal is first arriving for Apple devices, making its way to iPhone, iPad, and Mac users on the PayPal website. The company hasn't offered a formal ETA for when we can expect the feature on Android, but it hopefully shouldn't be long, with the underlying software support in place.

International support for PayPal passkey authentication should begin arriving sometime in 2023.