How to Move Your Passkeys to a New Password Manager Without Losing Any
How to Move Your Passkeys to a New Password Manager Without Losing Any
For roughly fifteen years, changing password managers meant the same undignified ritual: export everything into an unencrypted CSV file, import it somewhere else, then hope you deleted the file. It was insecure, and it worked well enough that nobody fixed it.
Passkeys made it impossible to keep pretending. A passkey is a private key, and the entire security promise of the format rests on that key never being handed around in the clear. A CSV export of your passkeys would be precisely the artefact an attacker would most like to talk you into producing. So the industry had to build something better before passkey adoption could scale — and, unusually, it did.
The result is the FIDO Alliance's Credential Exchange work, which shipped inside Apple's operating systems last autumn and reached Android in June. This guide covers one thing properly: performing that migration, on either platform, and confirming afterwards that nothing was silently dropped.
What actually changed, precisely
Two documents underpin all of this. The Credential Exchange Format (CXF) defines how a credential is represented — passwords, passkeys, verification-code seeds, notes and more. The Credential Exchange Protocol (CXP) defines how two applications hand that data to each other. The split was deliberate: format and transport are separate problems, and separating them let operating systems own the transport.
Worth noting, because most coverage glosses over it: on the FIDO Alliance's own specifications page, CXF v1.0 is listed as a Proposed Standard, while CXP remains a Working Draft. The data format is further along than the wire protocol.
Apple's implementation arrived with iOS 26, iPadOS 26, macOS 26 and visionOS 26 in the form of two classes, ASCredentialExportManager and ASCredentialImportManager. Apple's developer documentation is explicit about the security model: the system brokers the exchange and, in Apple's words, the process "doesn't write any data to the file system." No intermediate file means no file to be phished out of you. The documentation also notes that only credential data format version 1.0 currently exists.
Google followed on Android. According to Android Authority's reporting on Google's June 2026 Play services release notes, import and export of passwords and passkeys between Google Password Manager and third-party apps arrived with Google Play services version 26.21, which began rolling out on June 1, 2026. Bitwarden's documentation puts the floor at Android 14 or later with that same Play services version.
| Platform | Minimum requirement | Who starts the transfer | Intermediate file? |
|---|---|---|---|
| iPhone / iPad | iOS or iPadOS 26 | The app you are leaving (export) | None |
| Mac | macOS 26 | The app you are leaving (export) | None |
| Android | Android 14 + Play services 26.21 | The app you are moving to (import) | Varies by app |
| Windows | No first-party equivalent | Not applicable | Legacy file export only |
Before you start
Check all five of these. Skipping the first two is the single most common reason the destination app never appears in the picker.
- Operating system. iOS or iPadOS 26 or later, or Android 14 or later with Google Play services 26.21 or later. Settings will tell you both.
- Both apps on the same device, both updated. The exchange happens locally between two installed applications. An app you only use in a browser cannot participate.
- Both apps must support Credential Exchange. Ricky Mondello, who works on password management at Apple and writes about the standard in a personal capacity, lists Apple Passwords, 1Password, Bitwarden, Dashlane, DuckDuckGo and Devolutions among the participating apps. Support is per-app and per-platform — an app can support it on iPhone and not yet on Mac.
- Time and charge. Ten minutes and a device that is not about to die. There is no partial-resume if you interrupt it.
- Cost. Nothing. This is an operating system capability, not a paid feature.
One version note that catches people out: 1Password's own support documentation states that exporting from 1Password for iOS requires iOS or iPadOS 26 or later. If your iPhone is on 18, the menu item will not do what this guide describes.
The procedure on iPhone and iPad
On Apple platforms the transfer is a push. You start inside the app you are leaving.
- Update both apps and the OS, then open the app you are leaving and unlock it.
- Find its export entry point. Wording differs by vendor. In 1Password for iOS the path is Items, then Settings, then Advanced, then Start Export. Bitwarden describes the generic pattern as an option along the lines of "Export Data to Another App."
- Select what you are moving. Most apps offer everything or a chosen vault. If you have a shared family vault, decide deliberately whether it travels with you.
- Read the system sheet. Control now leaves the app and passes to an out-of-process system interface that explains the risk of exporting credentials and lists eligible destination apps. The exporting app cannot draw over this screen. That is the whole point of it.
- Choose the destination and authenticate with Face ID, Touch ID or your passcode.
- Let the destination app open and finish importing. Do not switch away mid-transfer.
Nothing is deleted from the app you are leaving. After a successful transfer you have two full copies, which is exactly what you want for the next few weeks.
The procedure on Android — and the direction trap
Android inverts the direction. Bitwarden's documentation states plainly that on Android the transfer request is initiated as an import request from the target application, whereas on iOS it is initiated as an export request from the original app. Same standard, opposite starting point.
This is the single most confusing thing about the feature, so here it is drawn out:
So on a Pixel, do not go hunting for an Export button in Google Password Manager and conclude the feature is missing. Open the manager you are moving to, find its import option, and choose Google Password Manager as the source. Anyone following an iPhone tutorial on an Android phone will otherwise spend twenty minutes looking for a control that was never there.
What can go wrong, and how to recover
The destination app is missing from the picker. Most likely it has not declared Credential Exchange support. Apple's documentation requires a participating app's credential provider extension to advertise the capability in its property list and declare the format versions it supports. If the app has not shipped that, it simply will not be offered. Update it; if it still does not appear, that vendor has not implemented it on that platform yet. Users on 1Password's own community forum have reported exactly this in the Apple Passwords destination picker. Nothing you do on your device fixes it.
Some passkeys refuse to move. Bitwarden's documentation notes that passkeys which use a hidden signature counter for security cannot be transferred through the Credential Exchange process. If a handful of accounts do not arrive, this is the likely reason. Recovery is straightforward but manual: sign in to those services and register a fresh passkey from the new manager.
Your manager is Microsoft's. Reporting through mid-2026 indicated that Microsoft's password manager did not offer passkey export to other managers. Verify against Microsoft's current documentation before planning a migration around it, and keep a non-passkey second factor active on your Microsoft account regardless.
You are on a Mac and the option is greyed out. The capability exists on macOS 26 and Apple Passwords supports it, but Mondello notes that some third-party apps have not adopted it there yet. Do the transfer on the iPhone instead; your vault syncs.
Autofill suggests everything twice. Expected, and easy: turn autofill on for the new app and off for the old one in system settings. Do not attempt to keep two managers synchronised with each other.
The reassuring part of every one of these failures is that the source vault is untouched. A failed Credential Exchange transfer costs you time, not data — which is more than could be said for the CSV era.
How to verify it actually worked
Do not skip this. An import that silently drops twelve items looks identical to one that drops none.
- Compare item counts in both apps. They rarely match exactly, because managers categorise notes and cards differently, but a gap of dozens means something went wrong.
- Spot-check three item types: one ordinary password, one passkey, and one verification-code entry. For the code entry, open both apps side by side and confirm they generate the same six digits at the same moment. If they do not, the seed did not transfer.
- Perform one real sign-in on a site where you hold a passkey, using the new manager. This is the only test that proves the private key survived intact.
- Open the new app's security review — Apple calls it the Security tab, other apps use names like Watchtower — and confirm it is scanning your imported items rather than showing an empty vault.
- Switch autofill over, then use the phone normally for a week before you touch the old app again.
When not to do this
Skip the migration, for now, if any of the following describe you. A password manager is infrastructure, and there is no prize for moving early.
- Your credentials are managed by your employer. Enterprise policy may block the export outright, and attempting it can generate a security alert. Ask first.
- You are mid-recovery on any important account. Finish that first. Adding a variable to an account you are already locked out of is a bad trade.
- You are travelling within the week. Migrate when you have your usual devices and time to fix something.
- You have twelve logins. Recreating a dozen entries by hand is quicker, and gives you a chance to prune.
- Your only device is a Windows PC. There is no first-party equivalent. Wait, or borrow a phone.
And one standing rule that outlives the migration: do not delete the old app when you are done. Stop paying for it if you like, but leave the data in place for a few months. It is the only backup that exists of a state your new manager cannot reconstruct.
The coverage of Credential Exchange has focused on the file format. We think the format is the least interesting part. What actually changed is that the operating system became the trust broker for a high-value data transfer. Every previous migration route used the filesystem or the clipboard as transport, which is precisely the surface that phishing exploits — the attack was never breaking the crypto, it was persuading someone to produce a file and send it somewhere. Moving the handshake into an out-of-process system sheet that the exporting app cannot draw over is a template, and we expect to see it reused for far more than credentials. The second consequence is commercial rather than technical: once leaving costs five taps and loses nothing, the export friction that quietly retained customers for a decade stops working, and retention has to come from the product. Note also an asymmetry nobody is flagging — iOS pushes, Android pulls. That difference in where you start will generate more failed migrations than any cryptographic edge case, because a user following an iPhone guide on a Pixel will look for a button that does not exist.
What we still don't know: how many real-world passkeys carry the hidden counter that blocks transfer, whether Microsoft will ship export at all, and when desktop support reaches parity with mobile. Until it does, the odd situation stands: the phone in your pocket handles this better than your computer.
Three Privacy Upgrades Worth Making — where credential hygiene sits in a wider routine.
Audit the Extensions, Fence the Smart Devices, Run the AI Offline — browser extensions are the other route into your logins.
Sources
- FIDO Alliance — Credential Exchange Specifications (primary)
- Apple Developer Documentation — ASCredentialExportManager (primary)
- 1Password Support — How to export your data from the 1Password apps (primary)
- Bitwarden — Security vendors join forces to make passkeys more portable for everyone (primary)
- Android Authority — Google's June update finally fixes Android's biggest password headache
- Ricky Mondello — Switching Password Managers in 2026
Version numbers and platform requirements verified September 10, 2026 and subject to change. GadgetGlow Bytes does not test hardware or receive products from manufacturers for coverage; every procedure above is drawn from vendor and standards documentation, cited.
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