An Identity You Can Carry
24 June 2026
A few months ago we wrote about adding passkeys to our games, and we still think they are the best thing to happen to signing in for a long time. No password to remember, nothing for us to store that is worth stealing, and no need to tell Google or Apple that you are logging into a children's game. What we did not dwell on at the time is the catch, and the catch is worth talking about honestly.
A passkey does not really live on your device. It lives in your device maker's vault: Apple's keychain if you are on an iPhone, Google's password manager if you are on Android, Microsoft's if you are on Windows. Inside one of those worlds it follows you around beautifully. At the border between them, it stops. If your phone is an iPhone, your tablet is an Android, and the family computer runs Windows, you do not have one passkey, you have up to three, and the company that holds each one gets to decide the terms. That is lock-in: not a lock on the front door, but a quiet cost to ever leaving. Real families do not have matching devices, and we did not like the idea that our sign-in was helping enforce somebody else's ecosystem.
So we built an alternative that belongs to you instead. When you create your identity, you can choose to save it as a file. The file is small, it holds the cryptographic key that proves you are you, and it is sealed with a password that you choose and that never leaves your device. Without that password the file is unreadable noise, to us and to anybody else who might find it. Where it goes afterwards is entirely up to you: a USB stick in a drawer, the family password manager, a folder that gets backed up with everything else you care about.
Signing in with it is the obvious thing. Open the file, type your password, and you are in. The same file works on an iPhone, an iPad, an Android phone, a Windows PC and a Mac, because it is the same key proving the same identity to the same server every time. One identity for one person, across every device that person owns, no matter who made them. When we say we support five platforms, this is what we would like that to mean.
There is a pleasant simplification hiding in this design. For most services, creating an account and backing up an account and signing in are three separate features, usually held together by an e-mail address they insist on keeping. Here they are the same act. Saving the file is your backup. Opening the file is your restore, and also your login. And because we never asked for your e-mail address, there is no "send me a recovery link" to fall back on, which cuts both ways: nobody can talk their way into your identity by pretending to be you, and if you lose both the file and the password we genuinely cannot get you back in. Keep a copy somewhere safe, the same way you would with any other key.
Passkeys are not going anywhere, and if your family lives happily inside one ecosystem they remain the easiest option on the menu. The point of the file is that it is a way out. We would rather not be the reason someone hesitates to switch phones, and we would rather not be the reason a family member is left out because they own the wrong brand of device. Supporting every platform we can has always been part of how we think about who our games are for, and an identity you can pick up and carry with you is that same idea, applied to the front door.