I also wish they'd have started off like that from the beginning.

It might have taken them a bit longer to get the initial implementation out the door, but it would have avoided all of these discussions, which I'm certain are also impacting WebAuthN/passkey adoption across the web (assuming that the views on passkeys here are at least somewhat representative of technical decisionmakers).

But if the choice is between getting to the status quo via suboptimal intermediate steps or not having WebAuthN and passkeys at all, the former seems much preferable.

I disagree somewhat that that is a "fumble" so much as a symptom of what was necessary to get mainstream acceptance, what a lot of us on HN see as "maximum vendor lock" is also an attempt at building a "pit of success" for average, "boring" users. An "Uncle Charlie" with an iPhone, an iPad, and a Mac that trusts Apple and was already using iCloud Keychain as their primary password manager is going to have an easy time with passkeys and is going to have a harder time accidentally enrolling a passkey they don't understand or know how to use the next time or next device they login from. That's a reasonable "pit of success" for an average, "boring" user.

There's a lot of users that isn't great for. Especially there are statistically a lot of iOS users that use Windows desktop/laptops that Microsoft and Apple are trying to bridge but don't always have the best UX today. Same for Android and Windows users, there's statistically even more of those.

Also, as you can tell from HN comments every time Passkeys come up, HN is full of anecdotes of the craziest mixed device ecosystems people can build. We can be a loud set of users, and we certainly need the most convincing that our "power user" needs are met for all of our complexity requirements.

I largely agree, except for this:

> anecdotes of the craziest mixed device ecosystems people can build

All it takes is for somebody to use both an iPad and an Android phone. iPads are relatively cheap (cheaper than many Windows laptops!); iPhones are quite expensive. That's a lot of users right there, and I think it must be at least as common as Windows + iOS users.

Right. That is not what I meant by "craziest mixed device ecosystems", and yes, I agree that Android + iPad is a common enough situation that needs good defaults that we haven't yet entirely solved for (but there are options today and hopefully it will get better). Windows "knows" it has to be a bridge device with whatever the user's phone ecosystem is, iPadOS today mostly assumes the user's phone "must be" an iPhone. From Apple's perspective that still makes sense as a useful "default" for what they consider to be their average user.