Samsung Passkey could be the next Google Password Manager and LastPass competitor

This year’s Samsung Developer Conference might have been a little underwhelming on the phone side, with news of Samsung’s lackadaisical One UI 7 timetable just leaving us feeling bummed out. But to Samsung’s credit, the company’s interested in a whole lot more than just its smartphone platform, and we got to hear plenty of news about the company’s efforts across the rest of the smart home, from Tizen TVs to smartlocks and showers. That includes Samsung expanding Passkey to begin supporting smart home hardware.

Passkeys, as you may be aware, are the new hottness in authentication, replacing easily hacked or forgotten passwords with biometrics tied to cryptographic keys. They’ve already made a big impact on Android, and the latest trend seems to be expanding passkey access across platforms, like we just saw Google up to.

For Samsung, that means letting you use the company’s own Passkey service on its connected TVs, starting with next year’s models. That’s at least an obvious target for this kind of authentication, letting you easily add credentials for streaming services. But that’s just the start of this expansion, and Samsung also intends to extend Passkey to its smart refrigerators and other appliances. Depending on the product we’re talking about, the benefits there might be a bit more narrow, but we imagine this will simplify device setup, at the very least.

Security is often one of the more overlooked components of a smart home ecosystem, so enhancing it a way that taps into software users are already familiar with, and operates as unobtrusively as biometrics, makes a ton of sense for Samsung.