Japanese version of this article is available here.
Intro
Hi, I'm @nov from Money Forward ID Service Development team.
It's been 3 month since we published the first Passkey Usage Report.
In this 3 months, we started passkey promotion to our end-users, and getting more and more passkey registrations.
Passkey Promotion Progress
In this June, we started our first passkey promotion activity for Money Forward ME (one of our major personal financial management app) users.
When users log into Money Forward ME using passwords, they see the passkey promotion page as below.
At the beginning, the target users were limited to 1%, but at the end of July, we expanded it to 100%.
Registered Passkeys @ 2023.08.15
The number of registered passkeys was 7,200 on May 15th, 2023, but now it's 56,000.
The following table shows the breakdown for each OS.
| OS | % in total # (May → Aug) |
|---|---|
| iOS | 58% → 65% |
| Android | 26% → 18% |
| macOS | 10% → 8% |
| Windows | 5% → 5% |
Passkey Usage @ 2023.08.15
On the other hand, looking at the ratio of passkeys actually used for login actions, the rate is declining across the board as shown below.
| OS | % used for AuthN (May → Aug) |
|---|---|
| iOS | 31% → 15% |
| Android | 33% → 22% |
| macOS | 38% → 24% |
| Windows | 36% → 16% |
It's only been about half a month since the promotion started for all Money Forward ME users, so it is understandable that a lot of passkeys are still unused. Even so, we can still see that the passkeys registered due to explicit promotions have lower usage because users are unaware of them.
However, Money Forward ID fully supports Passkey Autofill. In other words, we design the passkey login UX on the assumption that the password manager that's built into the OS and browser will prompt the user to use the passkey even if the user is not aware of the difference between passkey and password in the first place.
Based on that premise, it is possible that the reason why passkey usage is declining after the current promotion is that the password manager is not encouraging the use of passkeys.
Passkey Registration UX Challenges
The number of passkey registrations themselves has increased by about 8 times since the previous report, but in the passkey promotion, the badness of the passkey registration UX is also becoming clear in numbers.
On the passkey promotion page shown above, users are given the option to "Register this device" or "Skip", but on this page, about 50% of users selected "Skip".
Also, if users select "Register this device", a browser-native modal screen will be displayed and they will be prompted by the browser to register a passkey. We noticed that about 30% of users select "Cancel" even on this browser-native modal screen.
As a result, only about 35% of users who visit promotional pages actually successfully register a passkey.
Since passkeys themselves are not widely known, it is only natural that explicit requests to register passkeys would be skipped or canceled. At this rate, the future that the majority of the users move on from passwords to passkeys will never come.
As suggested in the GitHub Issue below, we are looking forward to a more natural registration UX.
[w3c/webauthn] #1929 Non-modal registration during conditional assertion
Comparison with other authentication methods
However, looking at users who have logged into Money Forward ME over the past two weeks, the number of logins with passkeys has far exceeded the number of logins with two-factor authentication such as TOTP and SMS OTP.
Moreover, it is the fourth leading authentication method after passwords, Google Sign-in, and Sign in with Apple. Yahoo! JAPAN and Facebook (* support will end at the end of this month) have already passed.
If we extend the promotion to users of Money Forward's business products, it will probably exceed the number of users of Sign in with Apple.
It may be more effective to support passkeys than to increase the number of supported OpenID providers.
Conclusion
This is the passkey usage status report for Money Forward ID as of August 2023.
Information such as the number of passkey registrations for other companies' services is still not readily available, but Money Forward ID will continue to publish such reports in the future.
I encourage all of you to share your company's numbers.
See you again in vol.3.
Ciao
-- @nov
