I want to like passkeys but I haven't had any success getting them to work. Every time I click on "sign in using passkey" both my browser (Firefox or Chrome, on Android/Win/Mac) and Bitwarden are like "no passkeys found" and I'm never given an option to create one.

I feel like I'm doing something stupidly wrong or missing a prompt somewhere, or maybe UX is just shitty everywhere, but if I, a millennial who grew up programming and building computers, struggle with this, then I don't expect my mom, who resets her password pretty much every time she needs to sign into her bank, to get it to work.

I'm in the same boat. I just cannot get them to work; they work sometimes on some browsers, but a solid majority of the time I click on "use passkey" I get a generic error message and end up going back and using the password flow.

I haven't invested more time in this because if it's so unusable for me as an engineer, it's a non-starter for the general public.

I'm a personal and professional advocate from r passkeys, yet I must acknowledge that your criticisms and skepticism are valid. I don't see this as a flaw in the passkeys concept so much as a growing pain. It's a very different mental model, and I've seen businesses make some very poor implementation decisions based on some poor understanding of what this system aims to be. That in turn adds to a bad consumer impression, a growing body of bad examples for others to look to and replucate, and it all just compounds.

I've found passkeys support on Windows to be a bit janky right now. You can get into weird scenarios where the passkeys don't work, but there's also no UI to remove them or reset them. This is especially annoying when you change out some component in your PC and it seems to void however they are encrypted and Windows can't figure out why it can't access them.

It's too early for grandma to use, IMO.

Most websites don’t let users sign up with passkeys. You need to create an account using email/password and then go to their settings page and create a passkey. Now you can sign in with the passkey.

I use Bitwarden in Firefox and passkeys "just work" on Linux, Android, Mac, and Windows. Previously, I used the extension in Chrome (Linux, Android, Windows).

The only relevant Bitwarden setting appears to be "Ask to save and use passkeys" under Notifications. I do turn off the browser's built-in password manager, though I believe anything else relevant I have at default. If you have those and they still aren't getting saved, then I'm at a loss, but wish I knew why they don't work for you. In Bitwarden, you can see if there's a passkey saved in an entry, as the creation timestamp is shown right under the password field and editing an entry also allows deleting a passkey.

Not just you. Browser support is horrid for physical passkeys, very hit and miss.

Depends on the brand of the passkey i think.

I've seen that kind of comments multiple times, and I don't get it.

I use Yubikeys, and passkeys just work. On Chrome, Firefox and Safari, both on macOS and Linux (specifically Alpine). I also tried with iPhones (for my family), and it also just works.

I haven't tried using an Android device, is it what you are trying?