Few things in life are certain, but Microsoft trying to get you to switch to Edge is one of them. This time, its latest ploy comes at the expense of one of its more useful apps — Microsoft Authenticator.
If you’re a frequent user of Microsoft Authenticator as a simpler, more secure way of signing into your Microsoft account, or other app accounts on your smartphone, you should know that it will lose a lot of its best features by August this year.
Edging out Microsoft Authenticator
In a Microsoft Support post, the company opens by saying how great MS Authenticator is before announcing that it will lose 1) the ability to save new passwords starting in June 2025, 2) autofill functionality in July 2025, and 3) access to your saved passwords by August 2025. The company says this is to “[streamline] autofill so you can use saved passwords easily across devices.”
This makes a kind of sense, seeing as how Edge has a built-in password manager that can handle autofilling and is compatible with most major platforms, whereas MS Authenticator is only available on smartphones. But if you like to have a layer of separation between some of your most private information and your browser, you’ll have to switch to something else.
Microsoft reassures its Authenticator users that their saved passwords are already securely synced with their Microsoft Account (read: Edge), so no need to panic, they won’t suddenly disappear. But their generated password history is stored locally on a device, so if you want to keep those, you’ll have to save them. Additionally, any payment info stored in the app will be deleted after July 2025.
Read More: How to avoid being hacked: up your password game – ‘12345’ doesn’t cut it
Just to be clear, it doesn’t look like Microsoft is completely scrapping its Authenticator app altogether — at least, not yet. Based on the support post, the app will remain alive and available to download and will still store users’ passkeys, as long as it remains enabled as their passkey provider.
If you’d rather not switch to browsing through Edge, here’s how you can export your saved passwords in Microsoft Authenticator and use them with a different password manager — check out Bitwarden (it’s free and open-source).
