About

About Passkey Lifeboat

Passkey Lifeboat is an independent guide to account recovery and prevention. It helps a person who is locked out find one safe next step, and it helps someone who can still sign in avoid the same problem.

What this site does

It explains, in ordinary language, recovery and prevention steps that Apple, Google, Microsoft, 1Password and Bitwarden publish in their own documentation, and it links to those official pages. The step-by-step guide asks a few short questions about your situation and gives one clear next step that fits your answers. It never asks for a password, a code or a key.

Who runs it

Passkey Lifeboat is operated by Bryant Smith as an independent project. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, sponsored by, or an official support channel of Apple, Google, Microsoft, 1Password, Bitwarden or any other service. It is not a company support desk and it does not sell anything.

How the guidance is put together

The step-by-step guide is deterministic: it follows a fixed set of rules and a separately stored, checked knowledge file, rather than generating an answer with a live AI model at the moment you use it. The rules choose between options; they do not invent instructions.

Provider-specific instructions are taken from the providers' own published pages. Each guide and each result links to the official page it came from, and the page records the date those pages were last checked. Where the documentation is conditional, the guide keeps the condition visible rather than guessing. Where the documentation does not say something, the guide does not fill the gap.

The written guides on this site were drafted with the help of AI writing tools and then compared against the official provider pages listed on each guide. They are not written by a security professional, and no expert has certified them. If you need account-specific or professional advice, contact the provider or your organisation's administrator.

What this site cannot do

• It cannot access, sign in to, change or recover any account.
• It cannot bypass or influence a provider's verification.
• It cannot tell you whether a recovery attempt will succeed.
• It cannot promise a specific outcome, wait time or eligibility.
• It cannot see your account, your devices or your stored passkeys.

Whether recovery is granted, what verification is accepted, and how long it takes are all decided by the provider. This site only reports what the provider documents.

What it knows about you

Nothing about your account, and nothing that identifies you. Your answers stay in your own browser. The step-by-step guide saves your current progress in your browser's local storage so a refresh does not lose your place, and that data is removed when you choose Start over or clear your browser storage. There is no account, no login, no server-side record and no request to any advertising, analytics or third-party service. The Privacy page describes this in full.

Things change

Provider requirements, waiting periods and recovery processes change over time. The guidance here reflects the official pages retrieved on the dates recorded on each guide, and it may become out of date. The provider's own page is always the final authority.

Corrections

If you find an error, an outdated instruction, or a broken provider link on this site, you can report it by email to passkey@bryantsmith.com. That is a mailto: link: it opens your own email application, and this website does not receive, store or process the message. Nothing is sent unless you choose to send it.

This address is only for reporting errors or outdated instructions in the guidance on this site. It is not an account-recovery service. It cannot access, recover or help you recover an account, and account recovery is decided by the provider, not by this site.

Please do not email any of the following, and do not describe your account history in detail:

• Passwords or passcodes.
• Verification or backup codes.
• Recovery codes or recovery keys.
• Secret Keys.
• Account identifiers or other sensitive account details.

To report a correction, the useful information is the page and the claim that looks wrong, and the official provider page you compared it with. You do not need to include anything private to report an error.

The address is read on a best-effort basis by the operator. Receipt and response are not guaranteed, and no response time is promised. The practical safeguard still stands on every page: each guide names the official pages it was built from, so you can compare any instruction here with the provider's current page before you act. If a guide disagrees with the provider's page, trust the provider's page.

Provider names

Apple, Google, Microsoft, 1Password and Bitwarden are named only to describe their products and link to their own instructions. All names and trademarks belong to their respective owners.