Microsoft Authenticator Discontinues Apple Watch App

[Treq]

No offense, but the film business is an outlier. I worked in I.T. for a company responsible for creative media and design work for many years. But even in their situation, the people doing the back-end office work like your Human Resources and Finance people were on Windows PCs. Nearly all manufacturing businesses are predominantly Windows-based, because the special-purpose applications that run their shop equipment almost never have Mac support.

Linux has a solid place on the server side. I've worked at places with combinations of Macs and Windows PCs who used Linux-based servers as "appliances" to handle things like the corporate anti-virus software deployment and monitoring. But aside from software programmers and hobbyist/tinkerer types, I don't see much Linux on people's laptops or desktop PCs. It's usually sort of a compromise or at least a bigger learning curve when you get more advanced with using and configuring it.

Well of course that’s true, I was just illustrating that real work is done on macs everyday and in some industries, it’s the dominant OS. Windows has a much larger user base thanks to a lot of work MS did getting their OS to ship pre installed on computers in the 90’s. It has created a market dominance that is very hard to chip away at. Even when their OS was considered a lemon. Like vista and win 8. Apple of course went the other direction and locked it down to only work on their hardware unless you hackintoshed which was always a little buggy. Not exactly conducive to a real work environment. But it still stands that real work is done on Mac everyday.

 

[Treq]

I work in a creative field that runs almost entirely on Macs too, but surely you have to know that entirely Mac-based industries are in the minority.

In fact, even in a fully Mac-based office, we still had a VFX guy running a custom-built Windows machine because there was no equivalently powerful Mac.

Sure, I never denied that MS has a massive market dominance, just that Macs are dominant in some industries and are more than capable to to real work. The OP I commented on seemed to dismiss macs for real work. They are completely capable and with the apple silicon SOCs they beat all but the most power hungry tricked out PCs for most real workflows.

 

[Treq]

Vast majority of workplaces are MS only. Actively so. It actually provides a pretty seamless corporate management framework. In fact I reckon a lot of IT divisions would ditch iPhones and iPads if they thought they could get away with it. If all you have if an Ms certificate, well…..

I don’t work in corporate management and I think most corporate management is out of touch with real work being done. Actively so. Anyway, mac integration is pretty damn seamless and has been for a very long time. It’s kinda their thing. Anyway, in my industry, I have no need for any MS software.

 

[ADGrant]

Why should anybody want to sign into a Microsoft account?

Maybe they like being employed.

 

[ADGrant]

I just checked the prices. Office 365 is really expensive. For just about €15 you can buy a legal perpetual license. That's less than the price of Office 365 for three months.

Why does it matter how expensive Office 365 is if my employer is paying for it and requires me to use it?

 

[ADGrant]

Not true. You can use any auth app that supports the necessary protocol. Google. Duo etc..It is just more work on them as you have to enter a code vs responding to a push notification

I have to enter a code with the MS Authenticator app, in response to a push notification. My employer requires MS Authenticator to login into a corporate desktop.

 

[ONJ]

Microsoft Authenticator is no longer available on the Apple Watch following an update to the app released on the App Store today.

"This update removes Microsoft Authenticator from Apple Watch," reads the release notes for the update. Microsoft notes that in the Apple Watch's notification settings, you can still choose to mirror iPhone alerts from the app to your Apple Watch.

Primarily used for signing into Microsoft accounts with two-step verification enabled, the Microsoft Authenticator for iOS gained an Apple Watch companion app in 2018. Microsoft previously announced that the Apple Watch app would be discontinued in early 2023.

The Microsoft Authenticator app for Apple Watch joins a long list of third-party watchOS apps that have been discontinued over the last few years, either because of perceived redundancy or lack of user uptake. Other notable Apple Watch apps that have been discontinued include Twitter, Instagram, Target, Trello, Slack, Hulu, and Uber.

(Thanks, Aaron!)

Article Link: Microsoft Authenticator Discontinues Apple Watch App

Why? It was a brilliant way to log in to all apps from Microsoft. Now it's a pain in the ass to authenticate via the iPhone. So odd.

 

[Ulfric]

I guess it depends on the work. In the film business you would be hard pressed to find a windows pc anywhere except as a prop on a show with a MS sponsorship. I’m sure there a few people who use them occasionally, but I rarely seem them. I, for one, never use any MS software outside of a gaming PC I built a few years ago just for games… and I’m considering converting it to Linux.

Even the VFX & CGI division?

As far as I am concerned the majority of 3D pipelines are on either Windows or Linux. Popular DCCs like Maya, 3DS Max (though barely used in films), Modo, Zbrush, 3DCoat, Mari, Katana etc. are better performant on either Windows or Linux.
For simulations, anything Houdini & other WETA tools are running on Linux.
I'm not sure about compositors though. What are they running their Nukes, Mocha Pro etc. on?

 

[expiredyogurt]

iOS provides this function too but it's sooooo garbage compared to ms authenticator. I rather use this than google's authenticator.
the iOS authenticator works well if you are logging in from an apple device. if you are logging in on Firefox, the way to get the code is to go to settings > password > unlock > search for the account > tap on it > get the authenticator code
how the hell is that better than using ms authenticator. I used it for dropbox once and immediately switched back to ms authenticator. absolutely ridiculous workflow process and it was done on an m1 Mac using Firefox too

 

[ID_Field_Blank]

I just checked the prices. Office 365 is really expensive. For just about €15 you can buy a legal perpetual license. That's less than the price of Office 365 for three months.

Where on earth can you get a perpetual licence for €15?! It’s £7/8 a month!

 

[bransoj]

I gave up on the watch app ages ago...just never worked for me at all.

Fintech here. We are supposed to use MS authenticator for SSO but I refused unless they gave a dedicated handset for it and any apps they want me to carry around as I'm not using my personal phone for company business (I don't trust them not to **** it up). They refused that and said "everyone else is fine with it" (until they broke icloud photo sync apparently). So I ended up with a Yubikey instead. Much nicer solution and supports NFC with the iPhone as well.

The MS authenticator watch app was bloody terrible anyway.

Isnt Authenticator just a local app that generates codes and having it on your phone doesnt mean your company can actually do anything with your phone? If the app caused any issue to your phone it would be Microsofts app more than anything your company has done.

The app just gives either a notification to approve or generates a code you need in line with the Microsoft 365 cloud end to confirm access. Now if they asked you to sign up to allow some form of device management via the Company Portal app thats a bit different. We had that at our college where i work to confirm devices were up to date and secure before allowing access to things like Outlook, Teams etc on personal devices however its gradually been scaled back to the point on iOS it just needs to check that its on a fairly recent version of iOS, has a 6 digit pin, screen lock out up to a max of a couple of mins and the Authenticator app is installed.

 

[webbuzz]

Do you mean that you can still approve with just mirroring? Or do we need the app to do that?

Mirroring allowed me to approve a sign-in.

 

[Danfango]

Where on earth can you get a perpetual licence for €15?! It’s £7/8 a month!

Nowhere legal believe me.

 

[Skyscraperfan]

Where on earth can you get a perpetual licence for €15?! It’s £7/8 a month!

Large companies often bought thousands of licenses in a bulk and often they have a lot more than they need. In Germany and some other countries courts ruled that it is legal to resell those licenses and that Microsoft has to activate those programs. The same is true for OEM versions. Microsoft sold OEM licenses that were bound to a specific computer, but courts ruled that it must be possible to sell those licenses and install them on another computer. That's why you can buy Office Professional for less than €20 here and for my Windows 10 Professional license I paid around €25 for example. Microsoft very much hates that this is possible, but they can't do anything about that.

Those licenses are sold at Ebay for example. They usually even come with an original sticker from Microsoft with the license number and often even with an installation DVD, although of course that DVD does not contain the most recent version anyway.

That's why I wonder why companies or even individuals pay a lot of money for Office 365.

And of course there are already very good free open source alternatives for Office products. I tried Outlook for example and it is really bad compared to free software like Mozilla Thunderbird or other email clients that are available for a small one time fee. I use Microsoft Excel, but also LibreOffice and Open OpenOffice and can't see that they are worse than Excel. In fact Excel in some ways is worse than those 2. For example Excel uses a single "undo stack" unless you open each file in a separate instance. So if you change some things in several files, you can only undo the change of the last file you changed. It also freaks me out that the "save" icon does not indicate if a file was modified since the last change. Other (no Microsoft) programs often grey out the "save" button if the file has not been modified.

Just government institutions in the EU spend €5 billion per year just for Microsoft licenses. I am sure for that money they could develope alternatives to Microsoft products and then use them for free forever. Imagine what you could do with €5 billion in taxpayer money each year.

 

[TheMacDaddy1]

The Watch app became useless to me over a year ago when we rolled out additional MFA context that requires you to input a two digit number into the authenticator app on your phone. That functionality never made it to the Watch.

If you scrolled up on your watch the number choices were listed.

 

[TheMacDaddy1]

I just checked the prices. Office 365 is really expensive. For just about €15 you can buy a legal perpetual license. That's less than the price of Office 365 for three months.

How much cloud storage do you get with that. I pay for a family edition. $59 a year. 6 users each get 1TB of cloud storage plus office apps.

 

[Skyscraperfan]

How much cloud storage do you get with that. I pay for a family edition. $59 a year. 6 users each get 1TB of cloud storage plus office apps.

Those companies always want to make us believe that we really need the cloud, but for the money that people spend on the cloud, they could buy enough storage for the own homes to back up all files multiple times. Internet speeds need to go up a lot until clouds really work well.

 

[dtlee1974]

Those companies always want to make us believe that we really need the cloud, but for the money that people spend on the cloud, they could buy enough storage for the own homes to back up all files multiple times. Internet speeds need to go up a lot until clouds really work well.

You are all missing the point. Enterprise O365 subs are not about cloud storage or Office licensing (although that's a part of it.) Its about the hosted services; email, Teams, SharePoint, endpoint licensing, etc. For example, Exchange Online had ~350,000,000 users as of 2022.

Also, I just confirmed that the watch app isn't required to process a push notification on the watch (I manually removed it from the watch and tested with the latest app.) This is good news. You can't get OTP codes on the watch anymore, but that's not a very large use case anyway.

 

[jakey rolling]

The OP I commented on seemed to dismiss macs for real work.

The OP (me) responded to a comment that started with "LOL" and was itself dismissive of a very important MFA method used by hundreds of thousands of corporate users daily. My one-sentence response was simply a reminder that there is more to the computing world than Apple's ecosystem and that the most common reason for anyone to use Microsoft's Authenticator is because their computer is a tool they use for work. You started out with a childish fanboy attitude and then got butthurt when reminded that the rest of the world doesn't agree with the marketing messages that you apparently agree with.

EDIT: Apologies - I realize that the original comment was a different user.

 

[Iconoclysm]

LoL who needs MS Authenticator when a competitive authenticator is already built into iOS? (I suppose folks still stuck on PCs.) *

But ultimately I wonder if authenticators in general will be depreciated as the move to passwordless login increases.

*Edit. I forgot the /s.

The authenticators are part of the push, really.

 

[Iconoclysm]

IIRC the issue is that the Watch interface can't display the pictures from Authenticator to show geolocation of the auth attempt and that's about to be a requirement for Authenticator MFA prompts. If Apple added a UI option to show those geolocation maps they would probably make the Watch app available again.

That's not the issue. It's related to number matching in a context menu and being able to input a number, not just press a button with the number on it:

"Additional Context preview is supported for Apple Watch. However, if the user has Number Matching enabled, they will be unable to use the Apple Watch for authentication. We are working with Apple to address this limitation."

 

[Iconoclysm]

You can only backup Microsoft Authentication to a personal Hotmail account, let that sink in

If it even were true, which it cannot possibly be true, what would be sinking in?

 

[Iconoclysm]

Large companies often bought thousands of licenses in a bulk and often they have a lot more than they need. In Germany and some other countries courts ruled that it is legal to resell those licenses and that Microsoft has to activate those programs. The same is true for OEM versions. Microsoft sold OEM licenses that were bound to a specific computer, but courts ruled that it must be possible to sell those licenses and install them on another computer. That's why you can buy Office Professional for less than €20 here and for my Windows 10 Professional license I paid around €25 for example. Microsoft very much hates that this is possible, but they can't do anything about that.

Those licenses are sold at Ebay for example. They usually even come with an original sticker from Microsoft with the license number and often even with an installation DVD, although of course that DVD does not contain the most recent version anyway.

That's why I wonder why companies or even individuals pay a lot of money for Office 365.

And of course there are already very good free open source alternatives for Office products. I tried Outlook for example and it is really bad compared to free software like Mozilla Thunderbird or other email clients that are available for a small one time fee. I use Microsoft Excel, but also LibreOffice and Open OpenOffice and can't see that they are worse than Excel. In fact Excel in some ways is worse than those 2. For example Excel uses a single "undo stack" unless you open each file in a separate instance. So if you change some things in several files, you can only undo the change of the last file you changed. It also freaks me out that the "save" icon does not indicate if a file was modified since the last change. Other (no Microsoft) programs often grey out the "save" button if the file has not been modified.

Just government institutions in the EU spend €5 billion per year just for Microsoft licenses. I am sure for that money they could develope alternatives to Microsoft products and then use them for free forever. Imagine what you could do with €5 billion in taxpayer money each year.

You are confusing a perpetual Office client application license with an M365 services and application license.

You could not develop alternatives to Microsoft products in the way you're describing. Moving to M365 results in a savings for your government vs. hosting and supporting all of these services. Teams phone services alone cut down prices by about 2/3. All of these services already integrate with each other out of the box. And there are close to 1500 different services to subscribe to. You're really not thinking this through.

 

[Iconoclysm]

You are all missing the point. Enterprise O365 subs are not about cloud storage or Office licensing (although that's a part of it.) Its about the hosted services; email, Teams, SharePoint, endpoint licensing, etc. For example, Exchange Online had ~350,000,000 users as of 2022.

Also, I just confirmed that the watch app isn't required to process a push notification on the watch (I manually removed it from the watch and tested with the latest app.) This is good news. You can't get OTP codes on the watch anymore, but that's not a very large use case anyway.

Exactly, I can't believe people believe O365 is just the Office suite and cloud storage. Just use a little common sense...

 

[tooloud10]

the iOS authenticator works well if you are logging in from an apple device. if you are logging in on Firefox, the way to get the code is to go to settings > password > unlock > search for the account > tap on it > get the authenticator code
how the hell is that better than using ms authenticator. I used it for dropbox once and immediately switched back to ms authenticator. absolutely ridiculous workflow process and it was done on an m1 Mac using Firefox too

"Hey Siri show me my Dropbox password"