Microsoft may not kill or nerf products and services with the same rigor as Google, but it’ll still retool its offerings. Case in point: Microsoft Authenticator, which has slowly lost features this summer—and is about to lose even more starting August 1.
Adding and importing passwords ended back in June, and autofill stopped working this month as well. Starting August 1, any saved passwords or saved payment data will no longer be available in the app.
Microsoft isn’t deleting saved passwords altogether, though. Those will be accessible through Microsoft Edge (surprise), which you can also use for autofilling your passwords across devices. (So long as you download and install the app on all your devices, including phones, of course.)
But Microsoft stresses in its post describing these changes that only saved passwords will make the transition to Edge—generated passwords and your history of generated passwords won’t be ported over. If you want to retain that latter data, you must manually save it from Generator history in Microsoft Authenticator’s Password tab to your saved passwords.
Funnily enough, Microsoft Authenticator isn’t completely disassociating itself from saved credentials. While passwords will get dumped, passkeys will still be supported in Microsoft Authenticator. In fact, if you’ve created passkeys for your Microsoft account, you must keep the Microsoft Authenticator app as the manager for your passkeys—otherwise they’ll become disabled.
If you don’t want to use Microsoft Edge as your password manager, you can export your passwords from the Microsoft Authenticator app, then import them into a different service. Paid password managers offer a wider set of useful features, like secure password sharing, emergency vault access, additional forms of two-factor authentication, and more. But even a good free password manager like Bitwarden is a good alternative—and upgrading to its paid service costs just $10 per year. (Yes, the whole year.)
