GoKawiilMegan Ellis / Android Authority
Between Google’s new Verified Email feature and passkeys for a passwordless reality, your account authentication is supposed to work seamlessly without requiring you to remember a hundred passwords. While Passkeys replace passwords, Verified Email is Google’s way of eliminating the OTP verification loop. I’ve always been excited about the idea of ditching those complex passwords, even though they are generated by my password manager, and multiple authentication steps. With so many options around to make passwordlessness a reality, I thought of giving it a shot.
On paper, it should have worked beautifully, making account logins simpler and almost single-tap. While the technology itself is quite impressive, I found the user experience to be much more fragmented than I would like it to be. That inconsistency literally threw my little experiment off the tracks — and I’ll tell you how.
What’s your biggest authentication annoyance today? 22 votes Remembering passwords 27 % OTP verification loops 36 % Passkey/device confusion 23 % Password managers not working right 14 %
Believe it or not, passwords are simple
Mishaal Rahman / Android Authority
We’re in 2026, and people are still reusing a single password everywhere. Even if you look around among your family and friends, you will notice that password managers are still only a thing among the more technically inclined, but tech companies somehow overlook that ground reality.
Whenever Google or Apple makes products to simplify sign-ins, they assume that users are already using a password manager and creating unique passwords for each of their accounts. They also presume a perfect understanding of multi-factor authentication. At least in my part of the world, the second factor of authentication is actually forced upon people with something as basic as SMS OTPs by the central bank to keep users safe from fraud.
Whenever Google or Apple makes products to simplify sign-ins, they assume that users are already using a password manager.
In an ideal world, you’d be using a password manager with unique passwords for each of your accounts or have set up passkeys, two-factor authentication would be enabled (ideally with a dedicated TOTP app), and you’d use device approvals or, even better, a physical security key (like YubiKey) to authenticate yourself.
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